Smart Mouth: Welcome To Sonoma County
Hello friends and welcome to Smart Mouth! My name is Dammit Damian Burford and I will be your guide on this journey!
Each week we’ll share local arts news, recommendations for upcoming events, commentary and occasional articles and interviews with the folks who are out there making the North Bay Area special.
Smart Mouth is an extension of my monthly Word Of Mouth Column I do for the Napa Valley Register newspaper, with a broader focus on Sonoma County and anything that doesn't fit the Napa newspaper.
I'm going to do that by focusing on the arts community and with a focus on small businesses, events and the things that spice up our lives. I’m an old punk rocker, so music will typically have more of a punk/indie/alternative lean towards it. I’m not a fan of jam bands, I don’t like most reggae and I can’t stand cover bands.
I’m not working to be an influencer, I want to be an explorer. There’s so many wonderful hidden and not so hidden gems in the area. There are so many places and people worth exploring. Thank you for exploring with me. 🖤
I've been dreaming of the Sonoma County since I was 17 years old.....
I grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, a smallish town just a little bit bigger than Santa Rosa.
I discovered punk rock counterculture of by way of BMX magazines and late night MTV.
Before long, I had found a small close-knit group of like minded late 90's punks. We did a self-produced magazine called KGB and we would bring our gigantic tape recorder with us to damned near every show or concert in the area to terrorize the touring bands with a handful of questions interjected with a lot of "uh's" and "ah's."
Shreveport was three hours from Dallas and six hours away from New Orleans. You could get to Little Rock in three hours, but it was never on our radar. But Longview, Texas was only an hour away. 45 minutes if you sped, like I did.
Longview, Texas had a surprisingly great punk scene. The promoter, Roy SoCalled, would rent out a VFW hall like space and throw DIY punk shows. Longview was 2 hours from Dallas and had developed a good reputation among indie punk touring artists.
Petaluma's Tsunami Bomb made regular appearances in Longview in those days. We would corner the band with our tape recorder after their shows and pester them about life in the far off land of California.
They would regale us with tales of the Bay Area and Sonoma County. They'd tell us about the Phoenix Theater and all the magic that was happening at the time in Petaluma.
I would continue to harass the bass player and current member of Tsunami Bomb, Dominic Davi via AOL instant messenger. I barely remember it now, but we'd chat into the late hours of the night about everything and nothing, but again we'd talk about "The Scene."
There was also the time I ran into Adam Carson from AFI right around Halloween in Dallas, Texas. The band had just put out their All Hallow's EP. Downtown Deep Ellum in Dallas was full of halloween revelry with folks in costumes and people everywhere.
We had just left a show at the Galaxy Club with Sick of It All and Hot Water Music, two bands who would become two of my all-time favorites. We were hanging outside a coffee shop. My friend randomly decided to jump scare a passer by, who just happened to be Adam, the drummer for AFI. Of course we had our trusty tape recorder in the car.
I asked him a series of terrible questions, but Adam was kind and receptive to us. He spoke to us about the Bay Area, Peet's Coffee and most importantly he told us about The Phoenix Theater in Petaluma.
I dreamed of moving west to the Bay Area and becoming real life friends with these bands, but I didn't have the courage to leave Louisiana on my own. A few years later I'd move to Colorado Springs with a band who were some of my best friends and it would take me on the journey that I'm still on now.
It's so wild to look back at my origins and to discover how important a part Sonoma County had in creating me, Dammit Damian.
We learned about the ethics of Gilman Street from those touring Sonoma County bands we'd meet in VFW halls and dive bar music venues. Even in Louisiana and later Colorado, we were meeting the people that Sonoma County helped create.
We were learning the ethics of how to be good punks from the people who built the community that still exists here in Sonoma County.
Fast forward 20+ years and suddenly, here I am living in Sonoma County, the place Adam from AFI talked about or the home of my internet friends in Tsunami Bomb.
When I slow down and think about it, it's so very surreal. It's all so very magical.
And it's magic that I want to start off with for this very first Smart Mouth email newsletter punk-zine thing.
I didn't mean to write so much. This first newsletter was only suppose to be one piece, but Sonoma got into my bones and inspired me with two pieces about discovering some special things in my new home.
First up, I had a random Friday night off and I decided to head down to Petaluma in search of friendship and community. I could have never guessed what I would find. Read all about it at the link below:
Damian Burford
And the main event for this very first email newsletter is an early morning coffee talk with Gabe Meline and Jon Del Buono, the folks behind the DISTURBING THE PEACE: Sonoma County’s Early Punk Underground museum exhibit that will be running in Santa Rosa at the Museum of Sonoma County from April 17–August 23, 2026.
I hope you'll check out this chat. I was exhausted from working five, fourteen hour days in a row with the Sonoma International Film Festival at the Sebastiani Theatre. I drank too much coffee and I rambled way too much at these two purveyors of Sonoma arts community. In turn, they gave me a very thoughtful and meaningful look into their work putting this exhibit together and what it means to them.
Damian Burford
It's special to me that I'm launching Smart Mouth with these stories.
These are the stories of community here in Sonoma. It's a look at the past, present and the future of what can happen in Sonoma County. I hope to somehow play a small part in spreading the WORD OF MOUTH about events and spaces like these in the near future.
To my Napa friends, I hope to keep working to harvest the many seeds we planted through my years running the Hollywood Room and writing for the Newspaper.
With this weekly email newsletter punk-zine thing, I hope to help build that community. I hope to find my own family and place here in wine country. I hope to change the concept of what Wine Country can be. I just want to be a part of something, anything and when I finished chatting with Meline and Del Buono I felt supercharged. I felt like I could do anything.
I hope you get a little bit of that charge reading about them and their work, or about a night out at a local dive bar music venue.
I'll be back next week with a chat with Bryce Dow-Williamson about the triumphant return of the Lost Church Santa Rosa. It's a real special place run by really special people and I can't wait to tell you all about it.
And starting next week I'll use this space to also list upcoming events and share local music news.
There's special stuff going on here in the North Bay. Thanks for joining me while I write and ramble on about it. 🖤