Downtown Petaluma’s Phoenix Theater is getting ready to celebrate its 120th birthday—and the old gal has never looked better.
Billed as The Phoenix Theater’s 120th Birthday Party with Toast Machine and friends (Thus the Buzz, Wad and Eleventeen), tickets are now on sale for the all-ages blowout set for 8 to 11pm, Friday, Dec. 6.
Anyone who has spent at least a few years in Northern California knows about and probably has a story about the Phoenix. Starting in 1904 as a vaudeville theater known as the Hill Opera House in its first incarnation, it was marketed as “the finest theater north of the Golden Gate.” However, it eventually faced a decline in popularity as motion pictures rose to prominence in the 1920s and 1930s.
The theater was adapted for film screenings, transitioning from vaudeville and stage shows to a movie theater. It continued as a cinema (first named the California Theater and later as the Showcase Theater) for several decades, showing films and hosting occasional live performances.
Throughout several upticks and downward slides, the theater held on. Current theater manager Tom Gaffey (who insisted this article not be about him) worked at the theater as a high schooler in the ’70s before taking off and returning to get the doors open again in 1983 as the new manager under the Phoenix name. This was due to its ability to continue to rise from damage and various other strifes that may have killed a lesser building.
Yet again, a noticeable decline in attendance made a movie theater a dicey business proposition. Gaffey started to notice a decrease in movie-going attendance and difficulty securing first-run, money-making films since the Phoenix only had one massive screen.
This reporter remembers a large cardboard cutout in the Phoenix lobby circa 1988 for Australian comedian Yahoo Serious’ attempt to break into American pop culture with his film, Young Einstein, slated for its Northern California premiere at the Phoenix. Never heard of Yahoo Serious or the film? That explains how the Phoenix ended up with the “nobody else wants it” opening night and also why the theater soon pivoted to live music as well as whatever locals, young and old, might want to put together in the space.
Clarifying this, Gaffey said, “We really couldn’t get enough people to get first-run movies anymore. Around 1987, we had done a sold-out show with the Violent Femmes, and I realized we could make it as a concert venue.” Thus, the hybrid Phoenix model came into play, where scatterings of movies that couldn’t receive an opening elsewhere trickled in alongside live performances by both local and major national touring acts.
As if a 120-year celebration wasn’t reason enough to come down to the Phoenix, the reunion of the fantastic band, Toast Machine, should help get someone out the door. If one was a local music fan between 1998 and 2010, they more than likely had the 2-piece band, consisting of Gio Benedetti on bass and Paige Warner on drums, pegged to be the next young Bay Area breakout band. However, that was not to be, as the duo disbanded due to the good old “irreconcilable differences” routine.
Benedetti said, “For Paige, she was an in-demand, an absolutely brilliant special effects engineer and artist at Industrial Light and Magic (ILM). That was her dream job. She was doing the thing she always dreamed of doing, and was happy to drum on the side, when it worked out. I was playing music and only wanted to play music, and wanted to spend weeks at a time on the road playing dive bars in far-off lands for no people (which would hopefully eventually become lots of people), and—well, I hope you can see the very natural conflict of interests here.”
As Toast Machine ended amicably, Benedetti joined Brother Comatose as bassist and, nowadays, creates impressive comic books and other artwork. Warner continues at ILM as a computer graphics supervisor, working on some of the biggest blockbuster films of the last few decades.
Yet Benedetti said getting back together with Warner has been mostly smooth. “We haven’t played live for eight years. It’s been rusty getting things back together, but it feels pretty comfortable. We played together pretty regularly for 18 years or so. And once the cobwebs get blown out, the body and brain tend to remember what to do,” he noted.
A few weeks back, Benedetti made a seemingly simple request on Facebook, asking
his followers to name a few bands they remember seeing at the Phoenix. Within days, the replies had hit well into the 200s. When asked what bands from the (still growing) list stuck out to him, he said, “Well, Sublime played their final show here, so it stands to reason that they were heavily mentioned. Lots of mentions of Primus, Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Green Day—the mega-big local bands that made it on a global level. It’s cool that we have that connection.”
He added, “My favorites are always the slightly less known bands—Fugazi and Jawbreaker are two personal favorites. Against Me! was one of my favorite shows ever; same with Joyce Manor. Just, great, great, great times with these bands in our town.”
While Gaffey remained reticent (to put it mildly, as I had just gotten yelled at for five minutes by him on the phone for daring to ask for a quote because, he insisted, “You should be talking about the Phoenix, not me!”) to talk about what his presence means to the Phoenix, luckily, Benedetti quickly answered when asked what Tom Gaffey and the theater mean to Petaluma and the local area.
“This is an impossible question to sum up or quantify,” he said. “Tom is responsible for the musical dreams, memories, careers and lives of so many people, mine included.”
Benedetti continued, “If you love to play music, and the only place to play is house parties or your garage, it can be very, very hard to build momentum or a scene, or [to] keep things alive. If your music scene can revolve around an iconic venue with a stage imbued with the lore and vibes of countless epic shows, you are in an entirely different universe. Support is necessary for art to survive, and Tom and the theater provide that.”
There is one thing Gaffey did say that sticks as representative of whom he is as a person and what the Phoenix Theater is all about—“It’s been my job to keep the doors open for anyone who needs the Phoenix. It’s been my honor to do so and to keep doing it.”
Tickets and more info at thephoenixtheater.com.
