Saturday, July 25. Sly and the Family Stone is playing loud on the second floor at 562 Bridgeway, and the bay fills every window. This local record party sold out before the doors opened. Katiana Giacona is busily engaged spinning colorful vinyl, chatting with music fans, and telling stories about the legendary artists whom she knows so much about.
Katiana wrote Record Plant, Sausalito Studios, 128 pages with a foreword by Rumours producer Ken Caillat. She is also a working DJ, a lifelong local, and a member of the Sausalito Historical Society. The party she threw that afternoon, billed as the Sausalito Music History Party and given over to funk, is the latest in a series of similar events she's hosted at Eria that have gained momentum and interest. It's a great way to spend a day in Sausalito, with food and drink available and access to the best views in town as a perk.
The bill was Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder, Rick James, Stone City Band, Prince, and Tower of Power. Giacona played the records, told the stories behind them, and left album liner notes on the tables for people to read.
John Wesley Payne, a Bay Area guitarist, bassist, and bandleader, was there and played. He turned up in a polka-dot suit and a top hat, which is a costume with a specific address, and set a Prince portrait on a music stand beside him before he started. He is good. He tells it that Prince heard him play and brought him out to Paisley Park, not as a touring player but into the room where the work happened, and that watching how fast Prince cut records reset his own standards. Payne has spent the years since producing, arranging, and backing independent funk, gospel, and R&B artists.
Two percussionists set up on the floor with a djembe and a dunun and played over the top of the set.
The room
ERIA-Trident occupies the upper floor. The windows run the length of the south and east walls, and on a clear day they hold Belvedere, Angel Island, the Oakland shoreline, and the San Francisco skyline sitting low on the water. A ferry crosses the frame every twenty minutes or so. The floor is wide plank, the chairs are black chiavari, and the bar runs deep with a honeycomb tile face and a cluster of glass teardrop pendants hanging over it like something caught mid-drip.
Look past the pendants. Above the dark modern soffit, a carved spiral medallion and a bare wood beam are still up there from an earlier version of the building, the kind of detail a renovation crew usually rips out and somebody here decided to leave. The room went around the old bones instead of through them.
The deck is the argument-ender. It runs along the water on the south side, catches the breeze straight off the bay, and opens right off the bar on the same level. People took it in sun hats and stayed there through the whole afternoon, looking out over the same water where Crosby used to anchor his sailboat fifty years before ERIA had a name.
The building
The place went up in 1898 as the clubhouse of the San Francisco Yacht Club, built for men in blazers who wanted somewhere to drink after the regatta. The club left in 1927. What followed was a sawdust-floor bar for local mariners called the Dock.
Frank Werber bought it in 1960. He managed and produced the Kingston Trio, and he turned the Dock into a Beat jazz room where Vince Guaraldi, George Duke, Bill Evans, Jon Hendricks, and Bola Sete played. By 1966 that era had run out, so Werber gutted the interior, brought in Roger Somers to build the curved wooden partitions, and had Steve Elvin paint the ceiling into a peyote swirl. He renamed the place after his production company. The Trident.
What he built was less a restaurant than a machine for attracting people. The interview was one question. A hostess who applied in 1969 remembered being asked her astrological sign, told them Scorpio because Scorpios were supposed to be sexy, and got hired on the spot. Four years later a college kid from out of state showed up with hair down his back, answered the same kind of question, and was told the Trident happened to be looking for Geminis that week. There was no dress code, and staff mostly went without one anyway: cowboy boots and cut-off tops, transparent gauze, velvet, nothing underneath, whatever felt like being yourself that day. Everyone who applied got a Polaroid taken first. On the way out of the kitchen, a sign spelled out the house philosophy in letters carved into a wooden post: STAY HIGH.
It worked. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh came in and slipped out to a corner of the deck to smoke, hiding from nobody. David Crosby anchored his sailboat just off the deck, and staff remember watching young women get ferried out to it by dinghy like something out of a pirate story, minus the pirates. Quicksilver Messenger Service, Jefferson Airplane, Van Morrison, Carlos Santana, Buddy Miles, Leon Russell, and radio deejay Tom Donahue came through. So did Julie Christie, Warren Beatty, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Robert Wagner, Natalie Wood, Lily Tomlin, Walter Matthau, Sterling Hayden, Ken Kesey, and Timothy Leary, whose girlfriend used the word intergalactic often enough that one hostess wanted to shoot her. Groucho Marx came in once and stopped the room cold, which nobody else managed, because by then the staff had gotten used to famous people simply being furniture. Sonny Barger drank at the bar next to Eastwood, each of them reportedly hoping the other would make him more famous. A young Robin Williams bussed tables, fresh out of Juilliard, trained on his first day by a bartender who remembers spending most of it talking about girls instead of work. Williams wasn't famous yet. Staff who worked beside him say he could stop a room anyway, just clearing plates. Steve McQueen ate on camera here in Bullitt. Woody Allen shot a scene inside for Play It Again, Sam in 1971, and the crew apparently used no extras, just whoever happened to be eating lunch that day. That is the reason the original room survives on film.
Janis Joplin's table was near a side door, chosen so she could come and go without the room turning to look. She used it until October 1970, when she died in Los Angeles at twenty-seven. The Record Plant opened two years and three weeks later. Of everyone in this story, she is the one who only ever got one of the two buildings.
In October 1971, armed men in wetsuits crossed the bay from San Francisco in a zodiac and came up under the building. The custodian was mopping the kitchen floor at two thirty in the morning when he felt something behind him, turned, and found the largest gun he had ever seen pointed at his face. The man holding it was a little shorter than him, dressed in a wetsuit that had not gotten wet, hood pulled down to nose and eyes. He asked who else was in the building. The custodian told him about the window washer working the dining room. They threw a dish apron over his head, walked both men into the men's room, sat them on the floor, and told them not to talk. For the next hour and a half the two employees listened to someone drilling the safe through the wall.
When it went quiet they risked a conversation, decided the men were gone, and checked the building room by room before anyone hit the panic button. About thirty thousand dollars had left with them. Somebody had spotted the boat crossing back toward the city, which is how the police caught them. The custodian still had to finish mopping the kitchen. The chef came in at six thirty, heard the whole story, and looked amused, less that they'd been robbed than that the custodian had managed to keep his head attached to his shoulders. The window washer, for his part, had used the ninety minutes tied up in the bathroom to work out how to clean up evidence of what the staff had been doing on their break before the police arrived.
And then there is the drink.
By 1972 Sausalito had become a landing spot for boats running Mexican marijuana up the coast, close to the Haight and far from the scrutiny of a San Francisco airport. The town filled with tequila drinkers. The Trident was pouring more tequila than any bar north of the border, with Cuervo blanco standing in the well. The bar had just installed a juicer, and a twenty-five-year-old bartender named Bobby Lozoff started playing with it. He had come up through the room, dishwasher to busboy to behind the stick. With Billy Rice he built a three-ingredient drink and called it a Tequila Sunrise.
On June 7, 1972, Bill Graham needed somewhere to put the Stones. They were a few dates into the American tour, between Winterland shows, and Graham wanted a room where nobody would bother them. Jerry Pompili, a promoter working with Graham, arranged it. They booked the Trident on a night it was closed and called in a handful of staff to open it for one party. A hostess named Cathleen Civale opened the door. She remembered exactly what she had on: satin thigh-high boots and a kimono top with nothing underneath it. Thirty-five people came through that door behind Graham, and one of the first things Civale noticed was that the bodyguards were carrying guns. She had not expected that. Nobody left until half past five in the morning, and nobody got too outrageous either, because everyone working that night understood the assignment: be cool, do the job, don't blow it.
Frank Werber was there to shake hands, which took some arranging, because that summer he was serving a marijuana sentence and slept in the Marin County jail every night. The room got the fireplace lit for atmosphere. Keith Richards flicked shrimp tails around the room and grinned about it like he was daring somebody to say something. Bill Wyman lost at backgammon to two of Graham's people. Charlie Watts sat with a scotch, listening to saxophonist Bobby Keys work through road stories in a Southern drawl. Jagger's head of security introduced himself to a young busboy as Leroy, declined a drink, accepted a coffee, and the two of them sat and talked for the rest of the night while the party went on around them.
Jagger came to the bar and asked for a margarita. Lozoff talked him out of it and built him a Tequila Sunrise instead.
What happened next is the whole reason anyone remembers. The drink was three ingredients, simple enough for any bartender in any city to make on request, and the Stones ordered it in every city for the rest of the tour. Keith Richards wrote the epitaph himself in his memoir. He called the 1972 run the cocaine and Tequila Sunrise tour.
The recipe had started as something more complicated. Lozoff and Rice built their first version in a chimney glass, layering tequila, sweet and sour, orange juice, and a float of crème de cassis over grenadine, working two hands at once because the bar ran hundreds of drinks an hour and never opened a tab. Cash only, volume only. That first recipe, cassis and all, ended up printed on the back of the Jose Cuervo bottle once the company realized the Trident was moving more of their tequila than anywhere else in the country. Somewhere along the way the drink got simplified down to the three ingredients that survived: tequila, orange juice, grenadine. Cuervo has used the Stones connection in its advertising off and on ever since, including a commercial set to their 1978 song "Miss You" over footage staged to look like 1972.
A bronze marker went up in the doorway in June 2023, placed by the Marin History Museum. Rice and Lozoff, named in metal, at the door of the room where it happened.
Downstairs
The marker is still bolted up in the archway, beside the carved sunburst doors. A sheet of paper taped to the door reads Closed.
The Trident ceased operations effective January 2, 2026, after 127 years of the building being one thing or another. The notice posted that day says a sale that would have kept it open fell through, citing a breakdown in negotiations with the City of Sausalito and a hard operating environment. The lettering over the arches still says THE TRIDENT. Two arches down, the glass says ERIA.
Half a mile north
Four months after Jagger put down that glass, the Record Plant opened half a mile up Bridgeway.
Gary Kellgren built a recording studio, or a clubhouse with tape machines in it. Waterbed floor. A ceiling painted into clouds. A hot tub. Chefs on call at any hour. He drove a purple Rolls-Royce with GREED on the plate and said the console was like a Ferrari, meaning it needed somebody who could drive.
He also looked down the street. The studio's flowing interior woodwork was drawn from the Trident's, the work Roger Somers had done in the room where Graham threw the Stones their party.
Somers came out of a stranger lineage than either building let on. In 1954 he and the poet Elsa Gidlow bought five acres above Mill Valley and called it Druid Heights. Alan Watts moved there full time in the late sixties and stayed until he died in 1973, working out of a library Somers' neighbor built him. Watts had come by way of the ferry Vallejo, moored in Sausalito and turned into studios by the artists Jean Varda and Gordon Onslow Ford. It was on that ferry, at a party Varda threw, that the poet Gary Snyder first met Somers and later became his carpenter's helper. Frank Werber, who owned the Trident, brought Somers down from that hillside to build the room. Twenty years later Kellgren copied it half a mile up the road. A style born on a mountainside commune ended up on a soundstage where Fleetwood Mac made Rumours.
The two buildings were built to feel like each other, and half a mile of Bridgeway was the only thing between them.
What happened inside matched the decor. Bill Wyman cut vocals lying on his back in a room called the Pit with a bottle of brandy for company. Kellgren and engineer Jimmy Robinson worked out a technique they called Astro-mixing there, whatever the astrology added to the console. KSAN opened its relationship with the studio by broadcasting live from inside it for seventy-two straight hours. Bob Marley played a closed session on Halloween in 1973 that later surfaced as Talkin' Blues. John Lennon and Yoko Ono reportedly showed up to the Halloween opening-night party at the studio dressed as redwood trees. Fleetwood Mac moved in and spent more than three thousand hours making Rumours, long enough that both couples in the band broke up before the record came out, and long enough that Mick Fleetwood came back decades later, found the building shuttered, and made a video pleading for someone to save it.
The people moved between the rooms the way the woodwork did. Jerry Garcia turned up at the Trident often enough to be named in every account of the place, and in March 1973 he cut a broadcast at the Record Plant with Old & In The Way. In 1978 Kingfish, Bob Weir's band, recorded at the studio and called the album Trident.
This was never two scenes. One town, one stretch of road, and eight years when both rooms were open at once.
The independent archive at 2200studios.us holds 452 researched entries covering sessions and broadcasts at that address, and Katiana Giacona is the reason it is that large. Her research and records account for a significant share of the nearly 500 entries built so far — dates, personnel, and session details that existed nowhere else in one place. Thank you, Katiana. Fifty-four of them are playable.
Next event — don't miss the fun
August 29, 11:30 AM. Same room, same windows, same gear. Katiana DJs, Marin Buzz hosts, tickets from $20. It's Michael Jackson's birthday, and we're celebrating with a dance party during the day.