On any given Monday night in Mill Valley, California, you might have walked into the Sweetwater Saloon for open-mic night and found Gregg Allman on stage. Or Bob Weir. Nobody announced these appearances. The musicians just showed up because the Sweetwater was their place -- the bar where famous acts played not for money or publicity but because they wanted to, in a room small enough that the performer's sweat landed on the front row.
Jeanie Patterson and her husband Jay took over the Sweetwater Saloon at 153 Throckmorton Avenue in 1979, and for the next two decades it became arguably the most important small music venue in Northern California. The club booked four to five acts per week, drawing from the extraordinary concentration of musical talent that had settled in Marin County after the 1960s San Francisco scene dispersed. Bonnie Raitt, Elvis Costello, Jerry Garcia, John Lee Hooker, Carlos Santana, and the String Cheese Incident all played the room. The BBC shot a documentary there on January 7, 1992, capturing John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt, and Ry Cooder performing together. Hot Tuna recorded two live albums at the venue, both featuring guest appearances by Bob Weir and Wavy Gravy.
The Sweetwater existed in a symbiotic relationship with Village Music, a nationally recognized independent record store a few blocks away. Store owner John Goddard held twice-yearly parties at the Sweetwater, inviting his favorite blues and R&B performers to play for packed, invite-only crowds. The connection between the two institutions -- one selling records, the other presenting the artists who made them -- created a musical ecosystem unique to Mill Valley. When both closed in 2007, documentary filmmakers Gillian and Monroe Grisman (children of mandolinist David Grisman) captured the loss in Village Music: Last of the Great Record Stores, which debuted at the Mill Valley Film Festival in 2012 and featured performances recorded at the Sweetwater by Costello, Weir, Cooder, Nick Lowe, and many others.
The original Sweetwater's end came not from lack of audiences but from real estate economics. In 2004, the landlord raised the rent beyond what the owners could sustain. By September 2007, the building needed renovation, and the property owners declined to offer a new lease. The Sweetwater went dark after nearly three decades. But Mill Valley refused to let it die. On January 21, 2012, the venue reopened as Sweetwater Music Hall in the renovated lower floor of Mill Valley's Masonic Temple, across from City Hall. Bob Weir, one of the new investors, captured the feeling: "For years, Sweetwater was the place many of us local and visiting musicians headed to when we were looking to play for fun. Well, our clubhouse is back." Jerry Harrison of the Talking Heads -- a Mill Valley resident -- performed at the inaugural event.
What made the Sweetwater matter was not just its famous performers but its scale. In an era when music venues grew ever larger, the Sweetwater insisted on intimacy. You could see the calluses on the guitarist's fingers. You could hear conversations between songs. The musicians who called it home valued that closeness -- it was why superstars kept coming back to play a bar in a small Marin County town rather than stadiums. Commander Cody's George Frayne once called nearby Stinson Beach "formerly the grooviest place on earth," but for three decades the title more accurately belonged to Throckmorton Avenue on any night the Sweetwater had music, which was nearly every night.
Located at 37.906N, 122.549W in Mill Valley, California, nestled in the foothills of Mount Tamalpais in Marin County. The original location was on Throckmorton Avenue; the current Sweetwater Music Hall is at 19 Corte Madera Ave. Nearest airports: KSFO (18nm south), KOAK (16nm east). Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 ft AGL.