The first edition of Coast Weekly opened with a troubling feature. “There’s been a symphony in these parts since the early 1940s,” it read. “The question is, will there be one here by the middle of the 1990s?” Gersh Kuntzman wrote the piece, pointing out that the previous year, Monterey County Symphony lost a whopping $100,000.
In retrospect, there was no reason to panic. But Kuntzman was writing when the past that we’re looking back upon was yet to come and full of both promise and uncertainty. Here’s a whirlwind overview.
Jazz is big here, enough that the likes of Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea and Jon Batiste have made the cover, among others. Miles Davis and Pat Metheny were featured twice. But did you know the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan performed here. The Dead played in 1988, the same year Bradley Zeve became editor and publisher of what was then known as Coasting. Dylan took the stage during 1995’s Laguna Seca Daze. The Jazz Fest, the Blues Fest, Cali Roots, Bach Fest, Lightning in a Bottle—we still host great festivals, but this is an event we miss. Appearing with Dylan were the Black Crowes, Widespread Panic and the Indigo Girls. The 1994 lineup included Blues Traveler and Phish.
But there are surprises over the past three decades, all found in the pages of the Weekly. Luciano Pavarotti performed in Pebble Beach in 1991. Run DMC arrived in Monterey that same year, at the now-defunct Doc Ricketts Lab. Woody Harrelson (the actor) played two shows in one day at Doc Ricketts in 1991. Actor Dudley Moore followed in 1996, giving a jazz concert in Pacific Grove.
In 2000 Ice Cube no-showed at a “secret rally” scheduled at Juvenile Hall in Salinas. Two years later, a Carmel Bach Festival performance by Serbian pianist Aleksandar Serdar was cancelled when the governement refused to grant him entry to the U.S.
So it has been an interesting 30 years. The music—and the surprises—continue to this day.