San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
LISTEN UP: TOP PICKS FOR ’24
The year’s music highlights include the Rolling Stones tour, Diamanda Galas’ live album, a Bob Dylan biopic and parallel festivals
In a case of San Diego-centered musical déjà vu, the good news and bad news for 2024 is strikingly similar to previous years. Some of the biggest concert tours of the year will be stopping here, while some of the biggest will be bypassing us. That means music fans can look forward to San Diego concerts in the coming year by Chris Stapleton, Billy Joel, Lainey Wilson, Noah Kahan, Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band, Herbie Hancock, Foo Fighters, Pink, Playboi Carti, Sarah Mclachlan and the Poway-bred blink-182. It also means they’ll have to hit the road to catch performances by the Rolling Stones, Eagles, Drake, Olivia Rodrigo, Bad Bunny, Nicki Minaj, Metallica, Madonna and others. Same as it ever was, to invoke the lyrics from a classic song by Talking Heads.
Happily, there is still a lot to look forward to in 2024 that won’t require traveling beyond the San Diego County line. Here are some of the concerts, festivals and albums I am most looking forward to in the next year.
Festival triumvirate
Mother’s Day weekend will offer two appealing and decidedly different homegrown options for music fans eager to attend outdoor festivals.
From May 9-12, the 21st annual Gator by the Bay will offer an expanded roster of blues artists to complement its usual fare of Cajun, zydeco, country, rock, jazz and soul at Spanish Landing Park. Confirmed artists include C.J. Chenier, Marcia Ball, Sonny Landreth, Southern Avenue, Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie and Nikki Hill.
From May 10-12, the third edition of the Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival will take place at Embarcadero Marina Park North and Seaport Village. Its lineup will be announced in January. Given that the two previous editions of Wonderfront featured Gwen Stefani, Ben Harper, Zac
Brown Band, Kings of Leon, Lainey Wilson and Busta Rhymes, the 2024 iteration seems likely to boast a notable roster of talent.
In the meantime, an air of mystery surrounds the return of the KAABOO Del Mar festival, which has been dark — and mired in multiple lawsuits — since its fifth edition concluded in 2019. On Sept. 12, KAABOO’S new operators reached an agreement with the Del Mar Fairgrounds for the festival to return in September, but declined to identify any investors or capital commitments. No dates or artists have been announced yet by Festival Licensing and Acquisition Corp., KAABOO’S new operators. They have also not given any indication if any of the estimated $500,000 owed to KAABOO ticket holders for the event’s canceled 2020 and 2021 editions will be refunded. Here’s hoping.
Gator by the Bay, May 9-12. Spanish Landing Park, 3900 N. Harbor Drive, downtown. gatorbythebay.com; Wonderfront Music & Arts Festival, May 10-12. Seaport Village, 849 W. Harbor Drive, downtown. wonderfrontfestival.com
‘San Diego Serenade’
Is a new Tom Waits album at last in the offing?
The San Diego-bred singer, songwriter and musical provocateur has not released an album of new music since the superb “Bad As Me” in 2011. He has not mounted a concert tour since 2008. What Waits has done is focus on film work, including roles in “Licorice Pizza” and “The Book of Eli.” And this year saw the release of remastered versions of the five groundbreaking albums he made for Island Records from 1983 to 1993.
So, fans understandably perked up in late May when Waits’ longtime Irish music agent, Paul Charles, disclosed that Waits has started writing songs again — and that some recording had been completed. Charles also said his fingers were crossed for a return to concert stages by Waits, who turned 74 on Dec. 7. It’s a hope shared by many.
Rolling Stones rock on
Say what?
On Oct. 20, the Rolling Stones released “Hackney Diamonds,” the band’s first album of new songs since 2005. The group, led by age-defying singer Mick Jagger, will hit the road in 2024 for a 16-city tour that, alas, skips San Diego.
But the Stones are performing at Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles on July 10 and July 13, and tickets are still available for the second date. It’s easy to snicker about the tour being sponsored by AARP, but the spirited “Hackney Diamonds” makes it clear the Stones — headed by the 80-year-old Jagger — are in no way the retiring type.
Diamanda Galas, live and remastered
San Diego-bred vocal wizard of awes Diamanda Galas has been turning heads around the world since the first of her 19 spinetingling albums, “The Litanies of Satan,” came out in 1982. Now, on the heels of her extraordinarily intense 2022 album “Broken Gargoyles,” she will release two albums in June, on her Intravenal Sound Operations label.
The first is a remastered version of Galas’ gripping 1987 album “Saint of the Pit,” which was the middle installment in her AIDS trilogy, “Masque of the Red Death.” It will be released concurrently with a mesmerizing new live collection that was recorded in Chicago and Seattle on her 2017 tour.
The live album is surely the first by any artist to feature the weathered spiritual “Let My People Go”; blues giant Howlin’ Wolf ’s “A Soul That’s Been Mistreated”; Johnny Paycheck’s doom-fueled honky-tonk ballad “(Pardon Me) I’ve Got Someone to Kill”; a wordless voice and piano version of jazz trumpeter Bobby Bradford’s “She”; and the chilling Greek ballad “Anoixe Petra” (“Open Tombstone”) — on which Galas’ suspenseful piano playing matches her singing note for note; and what is surely the most wrenching version yet recorded of Mexican poet Andrés Henestrosa’s “La Llorona.”
Bob Dylan biopic
Bob Dylan has been the subject and the star of more than a few movies. But the upcoming “A Complete Unknown” is the first conventional Dylan biopic, and he is one of the co-producers. It will star Timotheé Chamalet as Dylan, Benedict Cumberbatch as Pete Seeger, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as one of Dylan’s other love interests.
The director is Oscar nominee James Mangold, whose credits include “Walk the Line,” “3:10 to Yuma” and “Ford v. Ferrari.” The exact release date is not yet known. But “A Complete Unknown” focuses on Dylan’s early days as a jingle-jangle troubadour and his revolutionary transformation into an electric-guitar-wielding rocker. He personally annotated the script for Mangold.