If one is currently reading a copy of their county’s local alt-weekly, there’s a good chance they’re the sort of person who is already well aware of the Railroad Square Music Festival.
Since 2015, except for a two-year Covid-related hiatus, the festival has been taking over several blocks in downtown Santa Rosa for a free, all-ages day of music, food, art and community.
Josh Windmiller, a lifelong Sonoma County resident and co-director of the festival, says that RSMF is the spiritual successor to another event unique to the area called Handcar Regatta.
For those unfamiliar, the regatta took place every year in Railroad Square and invited anyone and everyone to construct handcars that could be operated on the length of train tracks that ran across Sixth Street. Think Burning Man art cars with a steampunk twist, and one won’t be far off from the aesthetic sensibilities.
“It was an event that could really only happen in Santa Rosa, just due to the availability of empty train tracks,” says Windmiller, “and so became a weirdly accurate reflection of the city’s spirit.”
When Sonoma SMART began development along the lines, the regatta was cut, and Windmiller spotted an opening. “I wanted to create something that held a similar reflective spirit, but was more music-oriented,” he notes. Along with co-founder and co-producer of the event, Susy Dugan, Windmiller set forth on creating a community-oriented music festival that was easily accessible to anyone and everyone.
As I interview Windmiller for this story, I begin to sense an undercurrent of subversiveness in how he describes the event. I ask him about my hunch, and he smiles a bit. “I’m obsessed with sneaking performance and art into places it is not present,” he explains. In the early 2000s, Windmiller began involving himself in the DIY performance scene in the area, and he began building a career out of a mishmash of various production gigs and musical performances with his band, The Crux. He continues, “In a sense, I’m trying to smuggle something into the public mind of our city.”
What exactly is he trying to smuggle in? The simple idea that Santa Rosa can be a place that sustains a larger cultural density than it currently does.
“Things have a shelf-life here,” he says. The things he is referring to are venues, shows and bands, which I am inclined to agree with. As a culture writer in the area, it sometimes feels like my beat is trying to catch flashes in the pan and document them before they fade from memory. He adds, “I want people to come to this event and walk away believing that we can be the kind of town that has more of it. Right now, we aren’t competing against other shows and events; we are competing against Netflix and HBO.”
According to Windmiller and co-founder Dugan, the key to consistently separating people from their home entertainment options is a mixture of familiarity and surprise. “We agreed early on that this would be a ‘genre-less’ event,” says Windmiller, genre-less in this context meaning that RSMF is not limited to any set sound or category of music.
Rather than booking according to a specific sonic vibe, the festival seeks to accurately reflect the variety of cultures and experiences that exist within Sonoma County.
“Josh and I are limited to our own experiences,” says Dugan, “so we make a concerted effort to reach out to our community about what they’re excited about.” Dugan also says that the festival is loosely associated with an advisory board that seeks to promote equity and visibility for all identities and walks of life in the area. “We make a concerted effort to reach out to our community about what they’re excited about,” she notes.
While this results in there being a little bit of something for everyone, it is also a model that promotes exposure to music that county residents might not be aware of. “I want everyone to leave with a new favorite band,” says Windmiller. Attendees this year can anticipate folk and country acts, Afro-Brazilian performances, Latin music, EDM DJs, youth bands, hip-hop and more.
In order to better uphold this vision of diversity and inclusion, the festival has tried to eliminate as many obstacles as possible for bands to pitch their hat in the ring to perform. “We have an application on our website that all bands can enter,” says Dugan. “There is no application fee, and we give consideration to anyone who applies.”
Windmiller and Dugan are also associated with The Lost Church, a non-profit music venue with a location in San Francisco and formerly a spot in Santa Rosa (though plans are underway to reopen a space soon), and have formed a large regional network of musicians and bands that they are excited to invite into the festival.
Dugan is emphatic that, along with the music lineup, this year’s vendor marketplace is an equally important element in RSMF’s mission to represent as broad of a swath of Sonoma County’s cultural diversity as possible. “We have brought in so many incredible artists, craft-makers and food vendors this year,” she says, “and they come from all different cultures in the county.”
There is also an incredible amount of attention being paid to accessibility at the event. For those who wish to drive, there is ample parking, but the festival will also support alternative means of transportation. The event connects to the downtown SMART train station, and it sits along several bus lines. Windmiller and Dugan are both excited to report that there will be a bike valet for anyone who decides to ride in on two wheels.
In this tenth year of the festival’s existence, Windmiller has been largely successful in his dream of smuggling a pro-art attitude into the streets of Sonoma County. As he points out, the festival grows in scope with each successive iteration, has an incredibly positive working relationship with the City of Santa Rosa, and a seemingly endless stream of people excited to join on as volunteers.
He loves the idea of the festival becoming a year-round endeavor, with special seasonal events and perhaps even a pressed compilation record of associated acts. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility, but it’s not fully up to him either. The fate of art in our city depends on the people who show up, who get inspired to organize something themselves and who believe that the place we live should reflect our collective experience for everyone to come and celebrate.
The Railroad Square Music Festival runs from 12 to 7pm, Sunday, Sept. 28, in historic Railroad Square (between Third, Davis, Wilson and Sixth streets), Santa Rosa. For a complete schedule and line-up, visit railroadsquaremusicfestival.com.
