Gio Benedetti has come to accept that he can’t stay away from Petaluma for very long.
Like the prodigal son of legend, he always comes back – and most of the time it’s his tireless creativity that both sends him away and also calls him home.
A musician from age 13, Benedetti began his creative life playing electric bass for a band with the memorable name of Toast Machine.
“The loudest instrumental prog-fusion band you can imagine,” Benedetti described them with an added laugh, an infectious exclamation that frequently punctuates the memories he shares. “We played the Phoenix Theatre – and I worked at Copperfield Books.”
In 2010 he’d leave Petaluma to tour internationally as an upright bassist with the folk band Brothers Comatose. Ten years later, it was a stint as the education director at the Phoenix Theater would bring him back to town in 2020.
That, of course, was just in time for the pandemic.
“My COVID journey was that for the first time in my life as an adult I wasn’t playing live music,” he said. “The universe had an intervention and broke me from my addiction to having audiences applaud for me.”
After six months at home, Benedetti found he actually liked being around and having dinner with his wife and children.
“So, when venues reopened in 2021 and I started playing gigs again,” he said, “I began having these out of body experiences where I saw myself putting on The Bass Player costume, and that really shook me.”
Like many people whose lives had been significantly altered by sheltering in place, Benedetti found he didn’t want to “go back,” even if he wasn’t sure how to go forward.
“I took a really hard look in the mirror and asked myself, ‘Are you playing music because you love music, or because you love people clapping for you?’ It was honestly hard for me to draw the line between the two. But it did help me realize I wanted to help other people achieve their artistic aspirations.”
So, Benedetti stopped playing shows and took a job with Sonoma County’s Art Start program, mentoring teens.
“During the Pandemic I’d begun live streaming myself on Facebook, drawing a dragon every day at 10 a.m., and this more or less shone the Bat Signal that I could do more than music,” he said.
Eventually the Sonoma County library asked him to lead a comics workshop and thus began For The Love of Comics, an eight-week program for teenagers 14-19 in which they each create a comic strip that is ultimately included in an annual anthology.
On October 26, the third all new edition of “For the Love of Comics” will be released, with a big launch party on Saturday, October 26, at 2 p.m., at his studio at Barn 5400. The impressive compilation of comics by 12 artists (11 of them students, one of them Benedetti himself) is curiously subtitled “The Mysterious Daryl Daryl.”
“Session One,” Benedetti said, describing how the average comic-making class is structured, “is all about introducing The Poop Monster, which is what I call the voice inside each of us that tells us we can’t make art, or aren’t good at drawing or telling stories. Session Two is all about defeating that monster, with our mantra ‘Finished Not Perfect.’”
In Benedetti’s experience, the biggest hurdle in coaxing young people’s artistic inclinations to emerge is just getting them to turn something in.
“Every creative project goes through phases, starting with ‘This will be fun!’ before evolving into ‘This is a lot of work!’ and potentially crashing with ‘I don’t know what I’m doing!’” he said. “I’ve learned that holding out this carrot of a beautiful book they get to be a part of helps ensure they will finish their contribution. Because you can’t just encourage people to do cool things – you have to offer them a way to share it. That’s core to being an artist. That’s core to being human. Sharing stories.”
When talking about his ongoing collaboration with the Petaluma Library, Benedetti is quick to credit the institution as the reason all this is possible.
“They pay me and they pay for all the materials, so the whole thing is free for the participants,” he said.
After more than a year of borrowing spare rooms at the library or local schools, Benedetti now hosts his regular afterschool classes, workshops and camps at his studio space at Barn 5400. A vibrant hub for makers of all kinds, Barn 5400 is a complex of studios and shops housed in a renovated barn. A recent acquisition for Benedetti, his studio there has been essential to completing the pivot he began back in 2021.
“If you are in a place where real estate becomes a game played by the rich and famous, all your artists friends lose first,” he said. “You can’t support a thing if you don’t have a place to do it, and I finally have my own space to teach, to work, to have open office hours, to make art. It’s hard to overestimate the importance of having a space to do what you need to do, so it’s been really great having a home.”
And will he ever return to performing?
“I still play of course,” he muses, “and Toast Machine will always kind of be my local legacy.” In fact, it was recently announced that Toast Machine will be back for at least one performance as the headliner of the Phoenix Theater’s 120th Birthday Party show on Dec. 6.
There’s a pause, and then a splash of laughter once again.
“But the things that defined me and allowed me to do creative enterprises, it was always because there was a mentor inside the organization or the program who held me to a high standard, encouraged me, and supported me,” he said. “Now I get to be that person, in the place of my roots, and that’s okay. I mean, that’s what an okay person does – they find something productive to do, with their friends and family and community, and they get off the stage.”
