As coronavirus pandemic recedes, Petaluma’s summer festival lineup takes shape

The Petaluma Music Festival is returning this summer, live and in-person.

The Rivertown Revival is not.

Reportedly waiting until 2022 to invite its fans back to the McNear Peninsula, the eccentric annual Revival is joined in postponement by Penngrove’s 4th of July Parade and Duncans Mills’ Civil War Days, and the Sonoma-Marin Fair, all three taking a rain check for the second year in a row.

Meanwhile, a long-mothballed river celebration is returning this August after an absence of more than two decades.

With Sonoma County still hovering in a state of COVID-19 uncertainty — while certain sectors of the economy reopen and others remain closed — Petaluma’s ever-shifting recreation and entertainment schedule remains locked in a strange limbo of clashing schedules.

The Petaluma Music Festival, after shifting to a full-virtual platform in 2020, announced last week that the three-stage, multiple-artist, 10-hour-long extravaganza will take place Aug. 7 at the Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds in Petaluma.

The lineup of musicians will include some of Sonoma County’s most popular bands: SambaDa, the Motet, the Black Sheep Brass Band, Dirty Red Barn, Mestizo Beat, Kendra McKinley, Sebastian Saint James & The Highway Poets, The Commonheart, The Monophonics, Full Moonalice and the Time Has Come Revue (featuring The New Chamber Brothers and the T Sisters), and the Bandjango Collectif featuring Stella Heath.

The event will mark the beloved nonprofit festival’s 14th year, having become a dependable local benefit event in support of school music programs throughout Petaluma. Not surprisingly, as Sonoma County cautiously emerges from over a year of suspended and canceled events, there will be some conspicuous protocols in place to protect all participants.

“Our first priority will be for everyone to be safe while enjoying the festival,” according to a statement posted on the festival’s website. “Under current guidelines, we are planning on having a ’Safe/Vaccinated’ festival, and we will only admit participants and attendees who have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 at least two weeks prior to the festival, or receive a negative test result for COVID-19 within 72 hours prior to the festival.”

Tickets are now on sale, ranging from $55 for a basic, advance-purchase ticket to $149 for a V.I.P. pass, allowing for premium parking, shaded seating, and entrance to behind-the-scenes hospitality areas, with complimentary drinks and snacks, and special musician meet-and-greets.

In terms of the big summertime picture in Petaluma, one welcome surprise is the recent announcement of a resurrected Petaluma River Festival, an all-day affair set for Aug. 28. Co-sponsored by the Petaluma Downtown Association and Petaluma Sunrise Rotary Club, the celebration will feature boat and paddle-board races, live music, food vendors, a beer and wine garden and games, including a tug-of-war across the Petaluma River and Kayak water polo.

Announced as the “first annual” River Festival, the event is a post-lockdown reclaiming and re-envisioning of the beloved annual event that was originally launched in the summer of 1986. It ran for 12 years, and ended in 1997. Its memory was kept alive for a few years by the annual arrival of the schooner The Alma, which would dock in the turning basin for visits and tours. Those events stopped when the river became impassable due to a lack of dredging, but with that work finally completed last year, who knows?

The Alma could soon be returning to downtown Petaluma.

Other reunions, however, will have to wait a year. On the current website for the annual Civil War Days battle reenactments, in Duncans Mills, the next date given for the massive gathering is Saturday and Sunday, July 16-17, 2022. The annual Penngrove Parade, famous for rolling dozens of tractors through town every Independence Day, is also on hold, but a drive-thru community chicken dinner will take place June 26.