Over the Hill: Monterey and the Rio Load Up the Back Half of August
We spend a lot of ink on the Santa Cruz side of the Bay, so let the record show the southern shore is holding up its end. Over the next two weeks, Monterey's grand old movie palace and Santa Cruz's own repurposed cinema are both booking the kind of songwriter's-songwriter shows that reward driving Highway 1 with the windows down.
The marquee event lands Saturday, August 22, when Sun Kil Moon plays the Golden State Theatre in downtown Monterey. Mark Kozelek's project is not for everyone — the songs sprawl, the between-song monologues sprawl further, the whole thing dares you to be bored and then rewards you for staying — but in a restored 1920s-era showplace, with its plaster and gilt and cathedral hush, that meandering intimacy is the entire appeal. This is chamber-folk for a room that was built to make people look up.
The Golden State is the anchor of Monterey's downtown culture stretch on Alvarado Street, a walkable corridor where you can pair a show with the taprooms and pubs that give the neighborhood its pulse — Alvarado Street Brewery among them. It's a reminder that Monterey's music identity isn't only the festival heritage on everyone's lips; it's also a working downtown that turns out for a Saturday-night gig.
Back over the hill, the Rio Theatre on Soquel Avenue counters with two of its own. Saturday, Aug 15 brings Snail, the long-running Santa Cruz heavy-rock institution, home to the room — the sort of hometown booking a converted movie house does better than anyone. Then Wednesday, Aug 26, indie-rock lifers Built to Spill bring Doug Martsch's guitar-hero-for-people-who-hate-guitar-heroes catalog to the Rio's big single-screen room. If you came up on '90s indie, that show is less a concert than a class reunion.
Why bother crossing the Bay for any of this? Because the Monterey Bay is one scene wearing two costumes, and treating Santa Cruz and Monterey as separate music towns misses the whole geography. The same fog rolls over both. A songwriter who sells out the Golden State on Saturday could plausibly play Kuumbwa on a Tuesday. The bands know it — the routing tells you so — and the fans who only ever stay on their own side of the hill are cheating themselves out of half the map.
So this is your nudge, north-shore loyalists: point the car south at least once this month. The Golden State's ceiling alone is worth the gas, and Kozelek's ramble sounds better under gilt plaster. And Monterey folks, the Rio's waiting for you too. It's a bay, not a border.
Sources: Golden State Theatre — JamBase; Rio Theatre — Concertfix