As the onetime leader of the outlaw Sausalito houseboat band the Redlegs, Joe Tate occupies a uniquely maritime niche in the history of Marin County rock ‘n’ roll.

A singer-songwriter and guitarist, Tate led an obscure 1970s band that rarely played outside the houseboat community, never got a record deal — and didn’t want one — and sabotaged themselves at every turn. But the Redlegs are the only Marin County band I can think of that was at the center of a historic socioeconomic and political struggle: the houseboat wars of the 1970s, an intractable battle over the changing character of the Sausalito waterfront.

Tate chronicles that Wild West-like era in his new book, “Last Voyage of the Redlegs” (self-published, $24.95), dedicating it to “the victims and survivors” of those storied conflicts, which pitted the free floating and free living hippie houseboaters against the forces of the establishment: county officials, law enforcement officers and the developers of what is now Waldo Point Harbor, a 282-berth marina of floating homes in an unincorporated area at the northern end of Richardson Bay outside the Sausalito city limits. On its website, the harbor boasts of “the eclectic and diverse population you find today on the Sausalito waterfront.” In his book, Tate characterizes that painful period as “a class war between poor houseboaters and rich developers.”

Ironically, over the past 50 years, the 84-year-old waterfront elder has gone from being a charismatic young rebel to a respected pillar of the Sausalito community. A reverential Sausalito Historical Society profile celebrates his “life of music, mischief-making and community building.”

He’s such a colorful local personality that when he got married in 1996, he and his bride, Donna Bragg, were feted in an elaborate procession in the annual Sausalito Fourth of July parade.

Blue Monday Jam

In 2009, Tate started and hosted a weekly Blue Monday Jam at the Sausalito Cruising Club and still drops by to sing most Monday nights. At Studio D in Sausalito, he recorded an album, “Joe Tate with the Blue Monday Band and the Hippie Voices,” that features 15 of his original songs.

“He’s a celebrity here,” said Maggie Catfish, an original member of the Redlegs. “Some people call him the mayor. We used to all call him the boss. He’s still a person people look up to.”

For the past 25 years, Tate has lived with his wife in the Becky Thatcher, an ark built in Tiburon in 1890 and named after Tom Sawyer’s fictional girlfriend. Today, it sits on pilings at the head of South 40 Dock, looking out on a waterfront that has been Tate’s home since he settled there as a young hippie musician in 1967, the Summer of Love.

On the walls of his cozy living room are a pair of original paintings by the late Playboy magazine photographer and artist Larry Moyer, aka “the King of the Sausalito Waterfront.” They depict the jumble of houseboats and barges, ferries and funky flotsam that made up the houseboat community as it was back in those freewheeling days, when it was dominated by fanciful structures such as the Madonna of Gate Five, a majestic redwood-clad houseboat that burned down on Christmas night in 1974.

Inside the front door of the Becky Thatcher, a vintage Martin acoustic guitar sits patiently on a stand as if waiting to be played. An energetic octogenarian with white hair and a white beard, Tate isn’t shy about picking it up and breaking into a rendition of a song he wrote called “Sausalito Girl.”

Prominently displayed on an end table is a remote-control scale model that he built of the Richmond, a 65-foot-long tugboat that he and his bandmates and friends refurbished, outfitted with sails from a Chinese junk and sailed out the Golden Gate on a two-year adventure to Costa Rica, Hawaii and Mexico, a voyage that he recounts at length in his book. He also wrote a song about it, “Ballad of the Richmond.”

When he first moved to the waterfront, Tate bought his first houseboat — a construction shack on Styrofoam blocks — for $50.

“I stopped paying rent altogether,” he said. “How sweet it was.”

Rockin’ with the Redlegs

Originally from the Midwest, Tate intended to go to graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley to study nuclear engineering but dropped out during the Free Speech Movement on campus.

He became a member of Salvation, a San Francisco psychedelic rock band that performed at the Fantasy Fair and Magic Mountain Music Festival on Mount Tamalpais in 1967, the first major outdoor rock festival in history. Salvation made a couple of albums for ABC and opened for the likes of the Doors and Big Brother and the Holding Company at the Fillmore and Avalon ballrooms in the ’60s heyday of the Haight-Ashbury. For Tate, that band was hardly a salvation, souring him on the music business.

“I hated it and quit,” he said. “I was sick of the music. I didn’t want to be in a band anymore.”

After a couple of years that attitude changed when he began jamming with the musicians who would go on to form the Redlegs. “We really clicked,” Tate said.

The five-piece group got together on an old potato barge called the Oakland, which they equipped with a drawbridge that could be raised to prevent the police from coming aboard and shutting down their rehearsals whenever the wealthier people who lived in the Sausalito hills complained about the noise.

When the barge was sold out from under them, they moved out to a couple of hulking World War II drydocks that had been abandoned after the war and left as a floating eyesore in the middle of Richardson Bay.

“We moved everything out to the drydocks and started living out there,” said Tate with some disgust. “It was a really crummy scene. I don’t know how we lived there.”

The drydocks, emblazoned with “Redlegs” across the side, were so moldy and wet that the seams of the musicians’ jeans would rot out.

“Someone had the brilliant idea of painting the seams to preserve them,” Tate said. “The kind of paint we had just happened to be red.”

When Frank Werber, then manager of the Kingston Trio and owner of the ultra-hip waterfront restaurant the Trident, banished the unruly band from his trendy establishment, he blasted them as “just a bunch of rednecks.” When a local wit corrected him, saying, “They aren’t rednecks, they’re redlegs,” the band suddenly had a name.

“And it stuck,” Tate said.

Benefit shows

When he and his bandmates weren’t battling Marin sheriff’s deputies on the waters of Richardson Bay, Tate and the Redlegs would play benefit shows in the since demolished ferryboat the Charles Van Damme to raise money for lawyers to fight the county and the developers in court.

“We had a rock ‘n’ roll band, we had lawyers and we had a fundraising mechanism,” Tate said. “We were able to sustain the resistance for a long time.”

Filmmakers Saul Rouda and Roy Nolan cast Tate and the Redlegs as the heroes of “The Last Free Ride,” a 1974 indie docudrama subtitled “a hip pirate movie.” It includes a re-enactment of the Battle of Richardson Bay, a violent standoff between sheriff’s deputies and young houseboaters desperately fighting against the ineluctable momentum of changing times in Sausalito at the end of the hippie era.

In one skirmish, Tate earned his place in the annals of local lore when he threw water on the ignition of a gasoline pump deputies were using to blast protestors in skiffs with a fire hose, killing the engine.

“It shorted out and they couldn’t get it started again,” he said. “Then, the protesters started a bucket brigade and started throwing water on the cops.”

In these confrontations, guns were once drawn by deputies, protesters and police fell in the water and houseboaters battled with boards and grappling hooks.

“It was kick-ass,” Tate said. “It was no game.”

But by the end of the decade the hot war was over and a truce was drawn up. In 1979, the Becky Thatcher, now Tate’s home, made history as the site where an agreement was signed, beginning peaceful negotiations between Waldo Point Harbor and houseboaters organized under the banner of the Gates Co-op. Today, 38 houseboats remain on the dock set aside for the now-defunct co-op’s remaining members, according to Tate’s book.

“The remnants of the Gates Co-op are still together,” he said. “Rent is based on income, so the harbor has its low-income housing element. I believe what we did was worth it. It was definitely worth it.”

‘I miss it’

The Redlegs were active until 1988, continuing to play benefits for the houseboat community through its final year. In 1994, when he was 54 and worried about having a nest egg for retirement, Tate got a straight job with a Novato company as an electrical engineer, retiring comfortably in 2014.

In January, he announced on Facebook that he’s suffering from interstitial lung disease, which causes frequent lung infections. He hopes to live a few more years, until he’s 90, long enough, hopefully, to see his granddaughter get married.

In the meantime, writing “Last Voyage of the Redlegs” allowed him to relive his past, when he sailed the seas, lived rent free and played in a rock band that had a mission and a purpose.

“I miss it, I totally miss it,” he said. “Where I live here, the parking lot used to be full of mud. You’d be tracking mud everywhere. I didn’t have a washer and dryer like I have now. I didn’t have a microwave oven. I didn’t have granite countertops, but I just loved it then. I liked it better before. But let’s face facts, if it was like it was before, it would be too hard for me to live here. When you get to old age, you need to be more and more comfortable. Living the easy life is what I need now.”

Details >> Joe Tate hosts a book signing party with his band, the Hippie Voices, from 6 to 9 p.m. March 9 at the Sausalito Cruising Club at 1610 Bridgeway. Order books at thehippievoices.com/books.

Contact Paul Liberatore at p.liberatore@comcast.net