Pete Sears brings jam band Moonalice to Petaluma Music Festival

During a career spanning more than 50 years, keyboardist and bassist Pete Sears has played with such legends as Jerry Garcia and John Lee Hooker and helped navigate Jefferson Starship.

Now, he’s part of the Bay Area jam band Moonalice, which kicks off the Petaluma Music Festival at noon on Saturday. The band is a good reason to get to the show on time.

The festival, headlined by Chris Robinson Brotherhood, is a fundraiser for Petaluma’s school music programs and a celebration of regional talent.

More than a dozen bands, including local heroes Poor Man’s Whiskey, Stu Allen, Dan “Lebo” Lebowitz, and the T Sisters, will perform on three stages during the daylong event.

Sears, who played piano on Rod Stewart’s 1971 hit album “Every Picture Tells a Story,” said there’s something special about benefit concerts.

“Everybody’s there to help the kids in schools and help fund music programs,” he said in an interview with the Press Democrat. “When you’re doing that, it adds a spiritual feel to everything.”

There’s “sort of a glow about everything,” he noted in his dry English accent, “unless you play really badly, but even then it doesn’t really matter, because you’re doing something good.”

Moonalice isn’t known for playing badly. They have deeply devoted fans who admire the four-man band’s expansive sound and its willingness to take risks.

Sears’ bandmates are guitarist Barry Sless, drummer John Molo and Roger McNamee on bass, guitar and vocals.

Festival director Cliff Eveland says the event’s goal is simple: “Keeping music in the schools.” Eveland, a full-time teacher and band and choir director at Petaluma High School, said support for the arts is thin in California, and there’s “never enough funding for all our school’s needs.”

This is the 10th annual festival. To date, it has raised more than $205,000 for Petaluma’s public elementary and secondary schools. This year, Eveland expects the festival to draw a record crowd of more than 4,000 attendees.

British by birth, Sears’ career began when he was a teenager in England in the 1960s. He formed his first band in school, a guitar duo with no drummer or bass.

“But the reaction of our peers, especially the girls, sowed a seed that stayed with me and set me off on a long career in music,” he said in an interview with the rock music website DME.

In his late teens, Sears became the bassist for The Sons of Fred. The band got a record deal and traveled the British Isles in a beat-up van “covered in fans’ lipstick,” playing almost every night.

“It was a great way to learn the ropes,” he said.

Much of British rock in the 1960s was influenced by American blues, which suited Sears.

“There is purity to the music of the early blues musicians,” Sears told DME. “It grew out of poverty, pain and years of slavery and discrimination.”

The music of Leadbelly, Robert Johnson and, later, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker had “dignity and originality,” he said, and blues musicians “lived life on their own terms.”

in 1969, when Sears was 21, he moved to the Bay Area and connected with Paul Kantner and Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane.

“After a very cool meeting with Paul and Grace at their incredible house overlooking San Francisco Bay, I decided to join,” he said.

After some personnel changes, the band became Jefferson Starship, and Sears and Slick wrote a song called “Hyperdrive” for the first album.

“There was a wonderful spontaneity to the band, and we’d play these mammoth three-hour sets with lots of jamming,” he said. “Time just slipped away, as it does when you’re having fun.”

Sears’ personal life was going well too: He got married in 1975 in Mill Valley. He and his wife, Jeannette, a Californian, had two children, Dylan and Natalie.

But there were some bumps on the road. In 1978, at a German festival called Lorelei, Slick fell ill (she was battling alcoholism), and the promoter announced Starship would refund the tickets and reschedule the show.

Part of that message was lost in translation and the crowd went berserk.

“They basically bombarded the stage with beer bottles and rocks, threw amplifiers over the cliffs into the Rhine River, stole equipment, and finally set fire to the entire stage with gasoline!” Sears told DME in 2010.

Sears lost most of his equipment that day including his “brand new, one-of-a-kind, custom-made bass,” made of cocobolo (a tropical hardwood) and birds-eye maple with a silver inlaid dragon that had LED eyes that light up.

Made by luthiers Tom Lieber and Doug Irwin, who built Jerry Garcia’s guitars, Sears’ bass, named Dragon, was made from the same piece of wood as Jerry Garcia’s famed Tiger guitar, according to Rolling Stone.

Miraculously, in 2013, German musician Klaus Wilm responded to Lieber’s four-year-old post in an online Grateful Dead forum, saying the bass had survived the riot and that he’d bought it around 1990.

Sears paid Wilm $3,200 for the bass and was gratified to be reunited with his treasure.

“It was in pretty good shape, but there was a crack in the neck,” Sears said in our interview in late July. Lieber fixed the crack and put some new pickups in.

“I played it for a while but that crack is just beginning to show a little bit,” he said. “It does hold its tension but could go any minute, so I’m not playing it right now.”

Sears plans to send the bass back to Lieber who now lives on East Coast. “Then I will probably play it some more.”

By the mid-80s, Sears had grown disillusioned by the commercial direction of Starship and left the band in 1987.

Sears then made an album called “Watchfire” with songs about human rights and environmental issues.

“Watchfire” - with renowned musicians Garcia, mandolin player David Grisman and African drummer Babatunde Olatunji joining Sears - came out in 1988.

Garcia helped fund a video made for the song “Guatemala,” Sears said. It was not a typical 1980s video.

“We used shots of actual human rights abuses we’d managed to gather from Guatemala, and sent out thousands of copies to human rights organizations around the world.”

A Canadian music video station put it into rotation, Sears said, but it was too political for MTV.

Starting in 1992, Sears played with Jefferson Airplane alums Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady in the folk-blues band Hot Tuna, for a decade of “very happy” touring.

And now he has played a decade with Moonalice.

After almost half a century in California, mostly in Marin County, does Sears feel like an American?

Not really, he said: “I pretty much feel like a first-generation immigrant … I feel English in my core, it never really leaves.”

Michael Shapiro is author of “A Sense of Place.” He writes about entertainment for national magazines and The Press Democrat.