Handbrake Hero headlines a $12 Saturday at the Mesa Theater

Handbrake Hero, Mercury Bloom and Splitting Image share the bill on December 12 in the Main Street room that started life as a roller rink.

Twelve dollars, three bands and a Saturday night on Main Street in the middle of December. Some nights out do not need a long pitch.

Handbrake Hero plays the Mesa Theater in Grand Junction on Saturday, December 12, at 8 p.m., with Mercury Bloom and Splitting Image also on the bill. Tickets are $12 through See Tickets. The show was announced October 23, and the room holds 850.

That price is the headline. A three-band bill for less than the cost of a movie and popcorn is exactly the kind of show that fills a club with people who came for one band and leave talking about another. If you have not caught any of these three yet, December 12 is a cheap way to fix that, and the kind of night where showing up for the first set pays off.

The room is half the reason to go. The Mesa Theater sits at 538 Main Street in a building with more lives than most in town. According to the historical marker out front, the site originally housed the Mesa Opera Rink, which opened in 1885. Later it became a movie house: Cinema Treasures records that it operated as the Majestic Theater before taking the Mesa Theater name in 1930, and that the Westland chain rebuilt it and reopened it on September 1, 1953, as the New Mesa Theatre. The building's run as a cinema ended in 1989, and the marker notes that it is now used as a venue for concerts.

A roller rink, a movie palace, and now Grand Junction's 850-capacity rock room.

That history is still in the bones of the place. Old theaters make good rock rooms because they were built for a crowd to face one direction and pay attention, and 850 is a comfortable size: big enough to feel like an event, small enough that there is no bad spot to stand. Grand Junction does not have many rooms this size downtown, and that is part of why the Mesa keeps drawing bills like this one.

A few things to know before you go. It is an 8 p.m. start with three bands, so the headliner will not be on early; plan your evening around that. Main Street in December means cold walks between dinner and the door, so dress for the walk, not the room. And at $12, buying ahead through See Tickets rather than waiting for the night is the easy call, since cheap Saturday shows have a way of creeping toward capacity.

There is not much else on the line here, and that is the appeal. No tour cycle to explain, no anniversary to mark, just a local Saturday in a historic room on the cheap. Grab a friend, get downtown early and give the openers a fair hearing. Some of the best nights at the Mesa start exactly that way.

Sources: Mesa Opera Rink historical marker (HMdb) (hmdb.org); Mesa Theatre (Cinema Treasures) (cinematreasures.org); Tickets (See Tickets) (prod-nts-api.seeticketsusa.us); JamBase listing (jambase.com)