Not that long ago, one didn’t have to go to Black Rock City to find a little Burner universe.
Sonoma County had its own countercultural festivals where music, psychedelia, spirituality and the perfect amount of “what the hell is happening over there?” coexisted in a space that, for one epic weekend, felt like another planet. It’s only natural that things have changed since those heady days of elaborate costumes, communal art and psychedelic excess.
As Black Rock City—which itself returns to dust and altogether ceases to exist after seven days—demonstrates, these festivals were nothing if not ephemeral. But what has become of the scene? And what has taken its place? Is the spirit that culture was born of still alive somewhere in Sonoma County?
Without a doubt, the biggest expression of that counterculture was the Harmony Festival. Founded in 1978, by 2009 it was packing in more than 30,000 participants at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds. Over its 33-year run, artists including Bob Weir, Lauryn Hill, Damian Marley, Cake, India Arie, Michael Franti, Primus and The Flaming Lips graced its stages.
Not unlike Burning Man, Harmony was a temporary civilization of seekers and misfits. One could go for the bands and end up at a lecture on ecology. They could get a massage, eat organic food (remember Lydia’s Loving Foods? To this day, there has never been a better place to get healthy, vegan, gluten-free food in Sonoma County), talk spirituality or discover some new form of alternative healing one had never heard of before. It was a very particular kind of Sonoma.
Harmony was an enormous undertaking, spearheaded by Debra Giusti. At its peak, producing the festival cost around $500,000, with no corporate sponsorship footing the bill. Giusti carried that risk herself, borrowing money against her house every year to finance the event, not paying herself (except the rare occasions she made $2 an hour—not a typo), and still only breaking even during the years she didn’t lose money.
“If you wanna lose some money,” Giusti said with a wry smile, “produce a festival.” She describes Harmony as a “passion that started from my womb but was activated and grown by the community.” To pull off such an enormous endeavor, “you’d have to have a crazy person like me,” she explained, noting that the project required her to work from 2am to 9 pm, four months in a row—and that’s with a volunteer team up to 1,000 people strong.
While she viewed producing the festival as a sort of “soul contract” (“It’s what I came here to do at that time”) and feels fortunate to have had the kind of time and energy to dedicate to the festival, it eventually began to compromise her marriage. So, after 25 years managing this mammoth venture on her own, she invited the community to help move Harmony forward. “It just wasn’t humanly realistic to do what I was doing,” she noted. Following that transition, extensive expansion got underway, and when that happened, the festival began to lose its footing.
“It was like a death of a child to me,” Giusti said.
And it was the end of an era for Sonoma County.
Of course, Covid froze the festival ecosystem for a while. And by the time things reopened, it wasn’t just the financial numbers that had shifted; demographics had shifted too. In 2010, around 14% of Sonoma County residents were 65 or older. The latest estimates put that figure at 24%. Of course, aging hippies are not the reason festivals faded. But the generation that had once filled these festivals was getting older, and there were fewer younger people coming along to take its place.
While the magical multi-day summer festival has become something of a rarity, the spirit of those gatherings keeps resurfacing in smaller places, on shorter timelines, and sometimes in even weirder costumes. We see it in the annual Rivertown Revival, currently on hiatus.
While not your typical three-day campout, it transforms Petaluma’s riverfront into a strange, playful little world for one summer day. One part community fundraiser, one part art festival and three parts steampunk fever dream, this festival features $5 weddings (yes, legal ones), homemade art boats, giant seesaws, DJs, costumes that look like they time-traveled to get here, and all manner of oddities and curiosities reminding us that Sonoma is still weird, even if one can’t always see it from the highway anymore.
Porchfest, which takes place during one day in Sebastopol, just celebrated its third year with 54 acts across 10 actual neighborhood porches. At once ambitious and intimate, this year’s event featured local grunge-punk heroes The Happys in a neighborhood that was closed to car traffic. Meanwhile, Santa Rosa’s Railroad Square Music Festival, another one-day event, is fresh off its 10th annual celebration of local live music. Both Porchfest and Railroad Square are free, and it’s worth noting that they’re also produced by nonprofits with extensive volunteer support.
Sonoma County’s festival spirit lives on in other experiments, like Healdsburg’s Analog Reunion, a three-day campout that swaps the massive festival formula for something more intimate and curated—live and electronic music, river swims, saunas and sound baths, glamping and dancing under the stars. True to Sonoma’s cozy vibe, the festival is capped at 700 attendees to promote screen-free, real-world connection where one can actually get to know the people they’re partying with.
And then there are independent, intentionally smaller gatherings designed to keep it weird in a sustainable format. Area 54, the one-night alien disco party, is touching down for its second close encounter with Sonoma County later this month—because of course we would love an intergalactic disco around Halloween. It’s no campout, but it’s plenty campy.
Created for “disco queens, disco studs, aliens and the alienated,” Area 54 features dance battles, a drag performance, side quest missions, a Soul Train line, chill zone, psychedelic art and an abundant supply of extraterrestrial nonsense on tap. Honestly? You had me at “Soul Train line.”
According to Cincinnatus Hibbard, Bohemian writer and one-half of Area 54’s production team, Performance Lab, Sonoma County’s tilt toward bite-sized, one-day gatherings reflects the realities of the current economy. Echoing Giusti’s experience, he said throwing festivals here is “incredibly hard. You basically have to martyr yourself. The arts in this sort of economic circumstance—it’s like having these wonderful, rare, exotic seeds, then trying to cultivate them in the desert.”
Still, Hibbard noted, Performance Lab is developing “new event formats and party mechanics. It’s creating laboratories or hothouses where artists can evolve and circumstances for safety for artists to create swings—and misses, too, which is part of the entertainment.”
“Created in service of the beauty of human connection,” the group’s events “tend to be kind of cozy and connective,” he added. “Lots of connections made, lots of friends and allies discovered, and just warm feelings. I’ve had a number of events end in spontaneous group hugs.”
Area 54 just may prove we don’t have to go to another planet to find intelligent nightlife in the Sonoma County universe. And it’s intentionally designed to be accessible to all, with tickets priced only to cover operational costs.
“So many people are in survival mode,” Hibbard acknowledged. “I’m not paying myself a nickel. It’s true, I could charge more. But I come from a little bit of a punk background.”
And that spirit seems to be a fundamentally inherent part of the Sonoma festival formula—some rare, ambitious souls willing to bet their time, money and sanity on some enormous, improbable idea, even knowing they won’t make a dime doing it. And that gives these kinds of projects more heart than they might get credit for.
Area 54 happens Friday, Oct. 23, at Barrel Proof Lounge in Santa Rosa, with tickets a stupendously affordable $15.
The old Sonoma festival culture was built around a form of martyrdom that was never sustainable and a willingness to throw a lot of money and energy at something whimsical and idealistic. In many cases, it could not have happened without massive volunteer support. But with more households needing two incomes and more folks struggling just to support themselves, fewer people have the bandwidth or spare time.
Perhaps that moment has passed, but the impulse to celebrate collective weirdness and connect through joy is still here. People still want to wear something ridiculous, dance like the world’s about to end, build preposterous things with strangers, and create worlds where magic and synchronicity roam free.
And Giusti is still committed to helping people find their tribe through her guide at transformationaleventsguide.com and newsletter at wishingwellportal.com. As for whether Harmony might ever return, she said, “There’s a reunion in my belly for the 50th anniversary in 2028. I think the festival needs a healing, because when it collapsed … it was really hard on everyone.” So here’s hoping.
The stages may be smaller now, but somewhere in Sonoma County, somebody is still welding a spaceship in their backyard, dousing themselves in glitter and dolling up for the next party. The vibe is still here—with less spectacle, perhaps, but equally more connection. The weird abides. Maybe a little lighter on its feet, but still dancing.
Area 54: Alien Disco transpires from 8pm to 1am, Friday, Oct. 23, at Barrel Proof Lounge, 501 Mendocino Ave., Santa Rosa. $15 advance; $20 day of. More info at barrelprooflounge.com. Tickets at bit.ly/alien-disco.
