Our picks for must-see upcoming concerts in the Palm Springs area
Here’s our list of shows happening between August and December 2024 that you should consider getting a ticket for.
A decade ago, a stretch of Highway 111 in Palm Desert was the Coachella Valley equivalent of Nashville’s Honky Tonk Highway: a 3-mile radius where venues like The Hood Bar and Pizza, Schmidy’s Tavern and the infamous Red Barn hosted live music every week. The main drag was the hub of the Coachella Valley’s once thriving local music scene, offering concerts put on by a new generation of local rappers and indie, metal and punk bands.
This live music oasis was just miles from the Empire Polo Club, home of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival that gained international prominence during the 2010s — when the desert music scene seemingly peaked. The festival and local scene had a bit of a symbiotic relationship then, inspiring many area musicians to up their game, and in turn rewarding many such as The Flusters, Ocho Ojos, CIVX and YIP YOPS with a spot on the lineup.
During the 2010s, there was also a renewed interest in the desert rock bands and “generator scene” of the ’80s and ’90s, attracting tourism from around the globe to sites such as the Nude Bowl in Desert Hot Springs and the “Welcome to Sky Valley” sign in Sky Valley that appeared on the cover of Kyuss’ 1994 album of the same name.
But a sudden shift happened by the end of the 2010s and suddenly there were fewer places to play as live shows became less lucrative for local musicians and bands and venue owners struggled with rising rents and inflation.
The economics of playing original music
For local bands that write and perform original music, it comes down to the economics. During the last decade, shows at The Hood, Schmidy’s Tavern and others were almost always free entry, with owners offering bands a small budget of $300 or a little more depending on how many local bands were performing on any night — no matter how many people showed up.
The Hood owner Brad Guth purchased The Hood in 2015 from brothers Patrick and Colin Hood, who opened the venue in 2008 as a punk rock pizza bar with live music.
“Every person I know that ever played at The Hood when it opened with the Hood brothers would go backstage, and there would be two pizzas, a case of Rolling Rock and they might even get a percentage of sales. That’s literally all you have to do to make the bands happy,” Wadlund said.
Guth is resilient in maintaining an affordable price structure for guests, and said he’s “done everything in my power” to keep it affordable for locals, selling certain beers for $4 to $6 while trying to improve the quality of its food menu items.
“We have one of the best happy hours in the Coachella Valley. Not only is the alcohol affordable, but we have done a lot to upgrade our pizzas, sandwiches and chosen more expensive products to put on them, and still offer an extraordinarily reasonable price for the amount of food you get. There’s a cost structure that’s involved,” Guth said.
Guth noticed a difference in the local scene when many of the bands he reached out to play at The Hood were no longer together, and there was a shift in his regular clientele at the bar during the weekends.
“People outgrow things, and I think in some instances, those people grew up, had families or got married and their families take precedence,” Guth said.
Woo questioned why any band should charge a large sum of money while working out the kinks of original material on a local stage. Still, there are some challenges local musicians need to consider whether they’re new or seasoned pros.
“When you’re starting, it’s like being a freshman in high school, and you join the varsity soccer team as the one who carries the balls and fills up the water bottles,” Woo said. “But it does get to a point where you need to be paid properly. You have to ask for a day off to play a show, so that’s almost $200 of lost pay, so it needs to be worth it. It sucks when a venue wants three hours of music and wants to pay you $300, because that’s not enough for one set.”
Joshua Tree musician Jesika von Rabbit, who has an upcoming residency at Harvard and Stone in Hollywood and will perform at Halloween Palm Springs on Oct. 31, said there’s a cost for both the artist and the venue when weighing the attendance and added, “if you put on a good show, you need to get paid, because it’s a service.”
“Musicians are like ‘we need to make money’ but I don’t want to ask for too much from a venue, and I feel like they didn’t pull enough money that night. At the same time, I brought my crew out and we have expenses, and we put a lot of energy into our show. It’s making sure everybody feels like they’re coming out at the end of the night without losing more than they put in,” von Rabbit said.
There’s also the need to build a setlist that’s crowd-pleasing, which means playing popular cover songs in local casinos, hotels, restaurants and private events. Josiah Gonzalez, frontman of the local band Avenida Music, said performing covers in these venues has provided opportunities for him and the rest of his band, which also includes his brothers Vincent and Samuel, and drummer Sean Poe. In 2023, the Gonzalez brothers opened Little Street Music Hall in Indio, a coffee shop and music venue that books many local bands.
“I have a family and need the regularity of these gigs. The older you get and you haven’t hit a home run on original music at some point and have other aspirations in life, you have to ask yourself, ‘Am I willing to shift my kind of desire for risk as I get older? That’s what we did early on and it gave us the ability to do the things we do now,” Gonzalez said.
“It’s all risk analysis, I know that I can get paid a certain amount of dollars playing these covers, and it’s almost a guarantee if I do these minimum things. On the flip side, you’re taking a much riskier bet with original music where you may not be paid anything, but if it does land and you get it, then your creative endeavor is higher because you’re doing your own stuff,” Gonzalez said.
The good ole days of the Coachella Valley music scene
Wes Gainey, a local musician and manager at Coachella Valley Brewing Co. in Thousand Palms who performed in the defunct local rock band Right On Right On, described the scene in its most recent heyday as a “close community.”
“It was a lot of fun. (Bands) were aware of each other, not overly competitive and were supportive. When I played, I’d see other musicians in the crowd and vice versa. It was a good mix of people doing it for fun, but there were others like ‘Hey, I’m on my grind and this is what I want to do,'” Gainey said.
The Flusters, a suit-clad band featuring four Palm Desert musicians, attained a large local fan base with its sound frontman Doug Van Sant coined “dreamsurf,” a blend of surf, vintage and modern rock. In addition to performing on the Outdoor Theatre stage at Coachella in 2016, the band filled up local venues, went on a national tour and played shows in Los Angeles and San Diego.
“It was a very indie scene,” Van Sant added. “And if you went up to the high desert, it was very psychedelic-rock focused. We played a lot of shows with Jesika von Rabbit and all the bands she would attract. (Local musician) Monica Morones was doing a lot of music blogging, people were photographing us and writing stories. It was a cool system with a multidisciplinary interest in creating these music and art scenes throughout the valley.”
Woo said the local music scene provided many opportunities for her, such as performing at the McCallum Theatre in 2016 during the east valley arts and music showcase “East Valley Voices Out Loud,” Chella in 2019, and Coachella and the Oasis Music Festival at the Plaza Theatre in 2022.
“I think being a good person gets you a lot, because then you’re offered these opportunities and you’re always grateful for anything that comes your way,” Woo said.
The challenges of operating a live music venue
The first venue to close on Palm Desert’s beloved stretch of Highway 111 was Schmidy’s Tavern in 2016, a bar and restaurant that also operated as a music venue during the weekends and hosted a weekly open-mic night with an elevated stage and professional sound system. When owners Dennis and Kathy Ford announced the decision to close, Dennis told The Desert Sun it all came down to a drawn-out conflict over the rent.
He said Schmidy’s had been without a lease for more than a year, paying 50% more than their original rent.
“According to the landlord, they say we owe them anywhere from $69,000 to $81,000 in back rent, which is not true,” he said in a 2016 interview. Ford also said the previous owners had renegotiated their lease and when he and Kathy bought Schmidy’s, they assumed that lease.
“Our landlord wants to raise the rent 112% and we cannot do that,” he said at the time. “They’re not willing to negotiate. They think this property is worth a lot more than it is and we can’t afford that, so we have no choice but to close the doors.”
Red Barn, which was one of Palm Desert’s most popular dive bars and live music venues, has been closed for more than three years following a June 2020 fire, and it then fell into further disrepair when its former owner painted controversial messages on the roof and squatted in the building for several months in 2022 before he was evicted. In March 2023, the building was bought by a group of owners under the name The Red Barn PD LLC for $650,000, according to property records. The new owners hope to reopen in early 2025 with DJs and live music.
Ever since Little Street Music Hall opened last year, Gonzalez said he and his brothers, who are also owners, have faced some challenges. They had to close for eight weeks over the summer because the building in downtown Indio, owned and leased by the city, did not have a fire suppression system, which was not included in its original construction in 1964.
“It was nice — we were getting good crowds, but we were reaching the maximum capacity of the building because we didn’t have fire sprinklers. That was the biggest challenge because of the eight weeks, a remodel and then getting everything back up and running again. We also had to rewire to get the lighting we wanted. The building is nice and great we have it, but it takes a lot whenever we want to change something and run into something that’s not as it should be and needs to be remedied,” Gonzalez said.
The Hood is not featuring as much local music during the weekends as it did before the pandemic, but Guth and promoter Nigel Dettelbach, who also plays bass in the local band Slipping Into Darkness, are making changes as to what gets booked and trying to book different events each month to attract a diverse audience.
Dettelbach is working with outside promoters to bring regional and touring acts to the bar, and there is now a goth night hosted by local event promotion group Luna Negra on the first Saturday of each month and a DJ night on the Saturday, leaving two weekends open for local bands.
Red Barn bar in Palm Desert to reopen after remodel
After a tumultuous closure in 2022 new owners hope to reopen a remodeled Red Barn with a different vibe in Palm Desert.
“What we realized is when a lot of these bands played — and I’m not criticizing the bands because it was our choice to have them — not everybody likes metal or wants to hear it every Saturday night because it’s too loud or it’s music they aren’t familiar with. We now offer a wider variety of genres. People like DJs and that suits one lifestyle, some people love metal and we get a lot of people on a metal night, some people like goth and we’re reintroducing that at The Hood. Many people enjoy the change,” Guth said.
Filling the venue gap
On a Friday night in May at Coachella Valley Brewing Co., local metal band Instigator performed a show in the brewhouse in front of a large walk-in freezer amid cases of empty cans. It was one of CVB’s last concerts in that space for the season because it’s not climate controlled, which represents another challenge that venues face in an area with sweltering triple-digit temperatures all summer. The brewery also hosts small acoustic performances and comedy shows in its lobby. Wadlund said the budget for the show was around $300, and that the opening band that night would take home about $80.
About 30 people attended and were in and out of the lobby purchasing beer during the three-hour show. There wasn’t a stage or adequate lighting, but there was a quality PA system and soundboard run by local band Fever Dog’s guitarist Quanah Lienau. According to Wadlund, who also works at the brewery, the band earns at least $300 minimum and a bar tab performing at CVB, and a portion of the band’s earnings that night went to the opening band, who performed its first show.
Gainey said live music does help the brewery’s daily sales, but there is an occasional bad night.
“The profitability is there on a net average, but it feels like a risk, and you sweat on the nights when there’s two people in the crowd,” Gainey said. “I’m very steadfast on being consistent, and if you come to Coachella Valley Brewing on Saturday night, there’s going to be music, whether or not it’s a big show in the brewhouse with three bands or an acoustic act in the tap room.”
Little Street Music Hall has become a popular venue with many local musicians who have performed there, such as Matt King of Salton City Surf Club and formerly Frank Eats The Floor, who embraced the space for its all-ages policy that affected him while playing in the latter during high school. Local venues such as The Hood would allow the band to play there with an adult chaperone or the members would have to leave immediately after their set.
“It sucked being young and having a lot of friends that were around our age during high school and weren’t able to see us perform that often. Thankfully, we made some fans and friends in the adult bar scene. But our friends and people from high school that supported us weren’t able to see our performances,” King said.
But the local music scene still exists in the spirit it did during the early ’90s at generator parties, which were held outdoors in desolate locations. Bands such as Fatso Jetson, Unsound and Kyuss would plug into generators to perform for attendees in a lawless environment. These types of underground, invite-only and often illegal concerts still happen in backyards and other locations in the Coachella Valley.
Miguel Arballo, guitarist of Salton City Surf Club and frontman of Destroy Nothing, has organized and performed at these types of shows and said the bands that play them don’t have any avenues or are rejected by local venues, such as hardcore punk bands from the local or regional area. The shows are promoted by word of mouth or in private groups on social media sites and require going through channels to buy tickets and directions to the venue.
Arballo said most backyard shows promote a safe environment without drugs or alcohol. The promoters or hosts of the shows don’t often make a profit and the proceeds are given directly to the bands.
“The main thing we set out to do is build a community. Aside from being able to promote great local music, there is a community out there,” Arballo said.
King described the backyard music scene, in addition to Little Street Music Hall, as “giving a breath of fresh air to the scene”
“I feel like bands prefer playing in those environments over bars and having to play a cover song so you don’t get booed off the stage. There’s some pros and cons with having a primarily do-it-yourself or backyard music scene, but the era we’re experiencing has learned a lot from previous eras that have been shut down because of fights or someone calling the cops,” King said.
Back to cover bands
If there is any sign of a local music scene, it’s now reminiscent of what has existed in the area for decades. There are now more bands performing cover songs. Walk by the many restaurants in Downtown Palm Springs during the evenings and you’ll likely hear songs you know coming from inside or on the patio.
Performing covers as a way to kick start their careers worked for two local musicians who found national and international success, and are now performing their own original music as signed artists. In 2020, Desert Hot Springs teenager and musician DannyLux uploaded covers of Mexican songs to TikTok and amassed millions of views. He was later signed by Warner Music Latina and performed at Coachella in 2023. Indio native Abi Carter grew up performing covers as a side act across the Coachella Valley at events like VillageFest, and went on to win season 22 of “American Idol” in 2024.
For Woo, who is in a unique position of playing originals and covers in restaurants such as Las Casuelas in Palm Desert and Delicias Mexican Cuisine in Desert Hot Springs, it’s about how she and the rest of her band members carry themselves during weekly residencies that provide that freedom of playing original music.
“Some gigs aren’t for everybody, especially when you’re not primarily a cover band. In my case, I can do three sets of original music, which helps us sprinkle in one or two covers and fortunately, we’ve been accepted with open arms. I think it’s because of the music and the style we play. We are welcomed in the restaurants, but even as a local band with opportunities for weekly residencies and being paid fairly, sometimes it’s not where your heart wants to be and you want to play outside of here, and there’s fear of being stuck in those shows,” Woo said.
Michael Anthony, a musician who hosts the weekly open mic night at The Hood Bar & Pizza, described the present state of the scene for this reason as “watered down.” Even though he admits to performing covers himself, he said “a lot of people go with what’s familiar.”
“I’ve got nothing against performing in restaurants and it pays the bills, but it doesn’t give you that insurance. Most restaurants have one artist booked for the entire performance season. I see them playing and no one is really paying attention. That’s a little sad. These artists want an audience every time, no matter where they go,” Anthony said.
During a July open mic night at The Hood, Redlands musician Colin Millsom brought a keyboard onstage and performed Elton John covers, which he said was a sort of tryout as he seeks gigs at other Coachella Valley establishments.
“I’m not looking to become my own name and play (only) originals, I think there’s certain artists that look to do that. My time passed, and I’m just having fun with covers. The reason I came here was to be in a scene I wanted to be in and branch out to more of the bars here to bring a flavor of music they like,” Millsom said.
Cover charges are becoming standard
Before the pandemic, patrons hardly ever paid a cover charge to see a local band perform original music. Many were promised small guarantees and proceeds would be shared between all the bands who performed at the end of the night.
Guth said a budget of $300 didn’t include the complimentary drink for each member of all the bands, which could cost up to $100 per night and an additional $300 for a sound technician and security guard, totaling at least $700 for each show.
But now a small cover charge is becoming a standard for all local music shows, and it seems to be working.
Dettelbach also had success with charging covers for his own band’s shows. He and Guth recently started a $5 cover charge at The Hood on Saturdays during live events with the artist or event promoters taking home 80% to 90% of the draw, which could be as high as $1,000 or more.
“I’ve always thought the only way to make money is by doing a cover, and it has been successful since we started a couple months ago,” Dettelbach said.
VanSant has a similar perspective based on his past booking experiences with Guth and other venue owners over negotiating guarantees and cover charges. The Flusters filled The Hood in 2016 for an album release party and again in 2017 between both weekends of Coachella, both shows had a $5 cover charge.
“I busted my ass to prepare for a show and put in many hours planning from the layout, promotions, setlist and what merchandise is going to go where, how the lines were going to flow and even drink specials,” VanSant said. “Things like the fees, breakdowns for bands and door charges, I talked about all of that with the owners before I printed the flyer Not every band has that and that’s where if you don’t have it, you can’t create a scene. So, you hire a manager or have someone help you that does that have it, because that’s what it takes.”
As an all-ages and family friendly venue, Little Street Music doesn’t sell hard alcohol but does have beer offerings. Gonzalez said if the venue had a full-size kitchen and sold hard alcohol, it could get away with not charging covers for shows, which is why it’s had a cover charge since it opened.
Gonzalez described the payouts as “generous” or standard to what’s common in the industry, and said there have never been any complaints from patrons.
“You hear about musicians earning poverty wages and they’re playing for $25 to $30 for an hour. As a performer, I don’t feel good about that, so we do door splits with all the artists and sometimes we offer some guarantees, but that depends on the size of the artist or band,” Gonzalez said.
Despite the new challenges for local musicians and venue owners, the scene isn’t “dead” per se, but it has shifted to meet the needs of both the bands and the venues. The opportunities remain for local bands and musicians, whether it’s playing covers in restaurants or performing original music, but it requires careful decision-making and more effort to promote shows that will draw an audience willing to pay cover charges or attend backyard concerts.
“Being able to play for anybody, no matter if it’s teenagers in a backyard or adults in a bar, it’s still cool. It helps scratch the itch of sharing your music in a live setting,” King said.
Musician von Rabbit attributes her success of performing in the desert and on tours to having a regularly updated press kit and sending it to promoters, constantly recording new music and releasing it on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music and making video content.
“There’s no one-size-fits-all (approach),” she said. “I’ve been doing this forever and still try new things out, and I either succeed or fail. You have to be tenacious and love what you’re doing. Because if you don’t love it, other people will pick up on that and it won’t permeate out to the ether. You also have to enjoy the ride because there’s no guarantee, it’s a rough and tough business.
‘Your life pulls you in different directions’
Woo, who started performing in the local music scene 15 years ago at age 24, said being a local musician is easy for people in their 20s who are single, can withstand late nights and perform at fundraisers and bars for free or drink tickets.
“I think during the pandemic, everybody figured out they had to slow down. Personally for me, shows after 10 p.m. now, it’s like ‘I can’t believe that was me once upon a time.’ Your life pulls you in different directions. In most cases, people have kids, bills and a 9-to-5,” Woo said.
That’s what happened to VanSant. Since the pandemic, he married his wife, Meagan, and the couple cofounded a video production business and recently welcomed their first child. In July, he closed his Palm Desert studio and rehearsal space after eight years.
VanSant described The Flusters as “still together in name” with he and bassist Mario Estrada as the remaining original members, along with drummer Ethan Banas. Six songs have been recorded for a new EP or possible album, but he wants to release it “when the time is right.”
“I’m not going to post a dramatic break-up post on social media, because it’s not necessary,” VanSant said. “The goals I set for myself over the years, I reached them. I did need to put it on the side for a little bit because I have my own professional goals with my production company, and I’m in a phase of life where I’m feeling good and complete. I think that’s going to help me creatively when I return.”
Brian Blueskye covers arts and entertainment for the Desert Sun. He can be reached at brian.blueskye@desertsun.com or on Twitter at @bblueskye.
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