The Golden Touch of
Maestro Moss
Another Strong Santa Barbara Bowl Season Is Unveiled,
Marking 30 Years Under Goldenvoice Promoter
Moss Jacobs’s Guidance
By Josef Woodard | April 3, 2025
It was 50 years ago, give or take, that this scribe and music addict discovered the great joys of live concert action to be found in the al fresco Santa Barbara County Bowl. Created with WPA funding in 1936, as a site for Old Spanish Days regalia, by the time of my concertgoing coming-of-age as a young teen in the 1970s, it felt like a kind of local sacred ground of musical inspiration and solidarity.
Among more famed acts who showed up in the storied hillside amphitheater at the corner of Anapamu and Milpas, including Jackson Browne in his major hit-making era, the personal epiphanies heard from my perch on the Bowl’s lawn (an actual lawn, then) included Little Feat (Lowell George era), BB King in one of his primes, and legendary jazz-plus band Weather Report. Even more memorable was 1979’s stellar Joni Mitchell show, in an all-star band featuring Jaco Pastorius, Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, and others, resulting in the Bowl’s most famous recording/film events, Shadows and Light. (I wasn’t lucky enough to have caught the other famous live document from the Bowl, a concert video release of Bob Marley’s 1979 show.)
Those early Bowl days became the start of a lifelong love affair with the venue and a concertgoing lifestyle, even before the Bowl achieved further greatness and vastly improved comfort and big-league concert logistics. The Bowl’s impact on the concert calendar is in the news again, embodied in a strong and wildly diverse 2025 season of shows, kicking off on April 11 with The Avett Brothers, on a list including James Taylor, Jack White, My Morning Jacket, Alison Krauss, The Flaming Lips, Father John Misty, Lake Street Dive, and many others (see “Good Times on Milpas Street: The 2025 Bowl Season” below). Be on the lookout for TBA announcements as the season unfolds.
It was 30 years ago, give or take, that promoter Moss Jacobs, having already established himself as a reckoning force with local concert and club promotion, was handed the keys to exclusively booking the Bowl shows. Working in that capacity first with the major concert and festival presenters Nederlander Organization and, for several years now, with the prominent Goldenvoice, with Coachella and Stagecoach festivals on their broad roster.
Although Jacobs moved to Los Angeles for a time upon entering the big leagues of concert promotion — at the Bowl, and venues like L.A.’s Greek Theatre — he settled back into Santa Barbaran roots, moving back here 22 years ago and easing into life with his wife, Kat, and three children.
Deservedly, Jacobs was one of the chosen community leaders and philanthropists in the Independent’s Local Heroes list last fall. Accepting his award from Editor-in-Chief Marianne Partridge at the Heroes lunch at SOhO, Jacobs deflected credit and paid respects to the team around him. But his personal leadership is, and has been, clear and present, and a force for good in Santa Barbara’s concert life.
The pathway to the Bowl’s legacy is a long and morphing story. Since 2009, with the retirement of general manager Sam Scranton, the already Bowl-entrenched administrator Rick Boller has solidly and unpretentiously filled the shoes as a solid GM and ground-level Bowl representative. Some now know Scranton’s name from the panoramic-view-enhanced Scranton Overlook, a popular intermission and pre-show hangout atop the Bowl property.
In a 2003 interview, fairly early in the current Bowl history phase, Scranton recounted a major shift in Bowl operations, from a business model involving the Bowl Foundation and a critical first step of improving the stage and property amendments on a property with “public safety issues with the water, the sewer, and the power dating back to 1936, and that wasn’t enough anymore. But you couldn’t just give the acts more power if you didn’t give them a roof to hang 20 tons of equipment, too. They both had to be there.”
A deal was struck with major concert roofing company, Brown United — who worked for Pink Floyd, the Eagles, the Stones, and big stadium tours — to create a “Frankenstein roof” from used parts. With that first step, in a long-range improvement plan adding up to more than a $45 million investment so far, the Bowl graduated to the adult table of viable amphitheaters, bringing the venue up to speed and competitive with famed venues in larger cities.
Scranton recalls, “We made that improvement and had Moss focusing [on booking], and went from 11 shows in ’95 to 25 shows in ’96, and we’ve never looked back.”
Good Times on
Milpas Street:
The 2025 Bowl Season
Crafting a Santa Barbara Bowl season can be a tricky endeavor, as Jacobs knows and has been attentive to for three decades. Parameters include making the numbers work, financially, for all involved, and the all-important curatorial task of appealing to a broad diversity of tastes and ages in the course of a season. From the starting-gate vantage, the 2025 Bowl roster is well-stocked and carefully, and inclusively, balanced.
As of this printing, new shows are still being added to the overall list of what will ultimately be roughly 30 shows in the spring-to-fall season, a list that kicks off with The Avett Brothers on April 11 and ends (so far) with Gregory Alan Isakov on September 12. Last week, the latest updates included a welcome return of The Flaming Lips — with Modest Mouse — on September 5 and fast ascendant folk-rock band Caamp (Jul. 18) — a band with 2.2 billion streams. Another welcome addition to the list is a return of the witty and literate raconteur Father John Misty (Jul. 24), who has called Santa Barbara home at times, linked to it being the hometown of his wife, photographer Emma Elizabeth Garr.
A double-header of consistent S.B. fave James Taylor lands at the Bowl on May 13 and 14, followed the next night by an artist of a different nature, the cagey blues-punk-rock-mystery-man Jack White (May 15), on his “No Name” tour. Bowl veterans tend to pass through on a repeat basis, as happens, again, with My Morning Jacket (Aug. 20) and Goo Goo Dolls (Sept. 6).
In keeping with a trend in recent years, country music has a solid stake in the Bowl roster, with Ryan Bingham (Jun. 14), Alison Krauss and Union Station (Jul. 15), and Dwight Yoakam (Jul. 11) on the books so far. In the realm of critically acclaimed R&B-flavored bands with charismatic lead singers at the helm, the Bowl stage plays host, with one June week, to Lake Street Dive (Jun. 28) and St. Paul and the Broken Bones (Jun. 21).
Also on the list, to date, covering multiple genre angles and audience appeal factors, are Khruangbin (May 21-22), Justice (May 23), Trampled by Turtles and Shakey Graves (Aug. 22), Japanese Breakfast (Aug. 23), Mt. Joy (Aug. 24), and Darius Rucker (Sept. 7).
Stay tuned for updates — a vital part of the annual Bowl buzz phenom.
Still, Scranton set straight the idea that major artists accustomed to playing venues much larger than the Bowl’s 4,500-seat capacity — a list including Sting, the Eagles, Radiohead, and James Taylor (here again May 13 and 14) — come here out of sheer love of place and city. “The cult of Santa Barbara likes to think that they come because we’re so groovy,” Scranton said, “but it’s a business and it’s all about the money. The fact that Santa Barbara’s a nice place and the Bowl’s got character that 90 percent of the places you play don’t have is all icing on the cake. The cake is about the business deal and what they’re going to make in this building versus some other building within a day’s drive. That’s what we’re competing against.
“You don’t have time to play everywhere. As a manager, I know that if you’re going to play 75 dates, you want 150 or more offers, so you can pick through them. You consider the money, the routing, ‘Am I going to sell more CDs? Did they treat us well last time?’ Production people are taking careful notes, grading you every time they come through, so they can refer back the next time around.”
Regarding the fact of the Bowl’s tight integration into Santa Barbara’s civic identity, Scranton said, “We like to think of ourselves as the Lambeau Field of rock and roll,” referring to the community-beloved and bolstered major NFL stadium in Green Bay, Wisconsin. “That’s exactly right. What other football venue has that level of community support? What other venue in the United States has this kind of level, where people feel genuinely warm and fuzzy about the Bowl? We’ve striven to create this. It was already there, because of how great it was.”
Cut to now, and the Bowl’s history is both well-settled into a perennial groove and gradually making new inroads as one of a seductive tour stop in the nation and the world, in an era that has grown ever-more complex in the age of touring consolidation and corporate entanglements. Despite the increased presence of destination concertgoers from Los Angeles and beyond, the Bowl still very much feels like home in its host city.
So does Joe’s, the historic Santa Barbara eatery on State Street. That’s where Jacobs and I met for a rambling lunch interview, in the intense prep period of the year when he’s assembling the building blocks and dealing with the delicate balancing act of creating. Having reached the ripe age of 30 in his Bowl-planning career, it seemed an auspicious moment to check in with the man behind the curtain, whom I’ve known since he roamed Santa Barbara’s not-so-mean streets as the kingpin of Moss Jacobs Presents.
Not that I’m asking you to tell your life story, but just to put the pieces and the chronology together, you came from the East Coast, correct? I came to college here from Florida, to escape the humidity. It was a goal of mine since I was 14, and I realized there was a non-humid part of the planet. And when I realized that that was California, I needed to be here. I went to UCSB, and then to law school.
When I moved back to Santa Barbara after law school while waiting for the bar results, a friend of mine, a badass photographer friend of mine, Leslie Holtzman, said, “Moss, there’s this band you gotta meet. They need some advice; they need some direction; they need some leadership.” I went and heard the band. I loved them. They were called Giant Eden.
One of their problems locally was, they weren’t getting a good place to play. With the help of a couple of friends, who remained friends for a long time, we started putting on shows for that band. I was their manager. We ended up at La Casa de la Raza.
I started the business of putting on shows, which was really appealing to me. I liked the hours. I liked the activity. I liked that no day or night was the same. There was lots of activity going on, it was fun, and I was around musicians — which I had a natural connection to.
You were a drummer. Were you playing at that time? I wasn’t playing anymore, but I played from my entire teenage years.
Putting on shows just clicked. Avalon Attractions, the company who was what I call the “alpha dog” of promoters in L.A. at the time, had an exclusive booking the Santa Barbara Bowl at the time. So, they hired me to be their local marketing guy. This was in the mid-’80s. I was doing their street marketing for them, and I was putting on my own shows.
And then Oscar’s opens, at 1129 [State Street]. I got the exclusive there. I was doing a couple shows over there, which was super fun. It was a place that, unlike La Casa, had a stage, and you could have a sound system and you could quickly bring fans in, make it work. For any Arlington shows, they wouldn’t call me; they would call Avalon. I was getting club shows, but they would call Avalon, the agencies, if there were any bigger bands.
But one day I got a call for an avail at the Arlington to do the Kinks. Avalon didn’t get the call. Being what I think of now as being strategic, I called my friends at Avalon and said, “Hey, why don’t we partner on this Kinks show?” They were pleasantly surprised that I got the call and happy that I called them. But they were thinking, “Oh, this guy’s now become a threat to our business in the market.” So, they hired me.
I started being at every Bowl show, continuing to be their local marketer, but now starting to work on shows in L.A. and San Diego, along with Santa Barbara. That was in the mid- to late ’80s. My small club stuff kind of ended in the late ’80s when I was just involved in bigger shows and, and being more involved in Bowl shows at that point.
I’m trying to remember the evolution of Bowl shows, as someone who has been going since the ’70s. You and the organizations around you really upped the game of what was happening there. Is that fair to say? It was classic rock in the ’80s. And then in the ’90s, the exclusive promotions contract with the Bowl expired. A company based in L.A. that was running the Universal Amphitheatre concerts, MCA, made a pitch to the Bowl and they got the deal. Avalon had been doing 30 to 40 shows a year. During the first year with MCA, they did 12 shows, and the second year with MCA, they did 11.
Sam Scranton [the Bowl’s General Manager at the time] was like, “Guys, this isn’t working. MCA is not working for us.” It became obvious to the Bowl leadership that people in L.A. don’t really give a shit about the Bowl. It’s completely understandable, but it really was gonna require someone with a love of Santa Barbara and a local connection, and someone who believes and puts the Santa Barbara Bowl first in the conversations about who’s playing on the West Coast. So, the Bowl called me and Nederlander — and Goldenvoice at this point. The Bowl calls and says, “Do you guys want to be the promoter?” “Yes, we do.”
We started with very little notice back in ’95. So, it’ll be our thirtieth — my thirtieth — year. We got very busy and the tone changed because at that time we didn’t have that year to go get James Taylor. It required us to get younger bands real fast, the bands that we had connectivity to. We didn’t have as much advance time. In ’95 is when a somewhat big shift happened and just who was playing. It worked because there were fresh eyes on who can play here. And it just took off from there.
And the structural improvements at the Bowl came later, right? Yes. And starting in the ’90s. A few years later, those big improvements happened because the Foundation was established. It was no longer just a county facility. Now there was the Santa Barbara Bowl Foundation. That was a brilliant move, to create this. It changed the whole dynamic. This partnership between this nonprofit foundation and the for-profit entity has worked very well.
The Bowl is a phenomenal group of people to work with. There’s no place I’ve ever done shows where I like the people more and I enjoy the people who work there. The people have a love for the facility. It doesn’t happen everywhere.
There is such a strong community feeling about the Bowl, from the audience to the infrastructure and workers involved. I don’t use the word “team” a lot, but there’s nothing like that team anywhere that I’ve seen a show or part of a show. The closest to that would be the Coachellas and the Stagecoaches, but those are festival teams. It’s the same thing — people who really like what they’re doing. The Bowl staff likes being there. There’s very little turnover there. Everyone enjoys and cherishes their work here, and they’re the best people in the world to work with me. A large part of the success of the facility is that team’s love of the facility. And it shows — the bands feel it; the public feels it. It’s always there. You can’t teach people that. They’re getting it from the inside.
It’s an amazing group of people to work with. Maybe, I mean, maybe I’m projecting, but maybe in L.A., there’s a lot more turnover because people are, you know, aspiring actors or whatever. People don’t feel that personal.
You lived in L.A. for some years when rising in the promoter ranks, but you’ve been back for how long? Twenty-two years. It was that whole family part of your life. I showed the people I was working for in L.A. at the time that while I could do well and work the place well while living in L.A., we could do a better job if I was here. I could be more of a participant in the non-show-day activities. That all adds up to what we do over there. It isn’t just show day.
They obviously have a commitment to keeping the Bowl process going. Would you say it’s a self-sustaining microcosm that you created here, which is different from other things Goldenvoice is involved in? The exclusive arrangement that the Foundation has with Goldenvoice is an arrangement in which both parties have shown the other that it works really well. It’s a great relationship. We’ve got each other’s back, and we’re very integrated in how we approach the business of putting shows on. One of the things that I really like about doing shows there is that across the board, the people that work there have an understanding of what I do and the little components of what we do to make our end successful.
Conversely, I have an understanding of what they have to do. It isn’t compartmentalized in terms of that much of what people are doing; there’s a bigger picture that’s always, that we’re all aware of. That’s why I think the bands love it so much and that the public likes it so much — because it’s the collection of people that are working here understand the bigger picture of what everyone does, and therefore the whole thing works.
I know who the people in the merch booth selling the T-shirts are, and they know who I am. That dynamic creates a better atmosphere there just because we’re all part of each other’s world. The same goes for the stagehands, the catering people…. We all understand the goals and how, as a group, we try to achieve them. It’s very unique.
Looking at the larger picture of the concert music calendar in this town, like elsewhere, the classical music season and series presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sometimes the Lobero, runs roughly from September to May. There is a similar buzz when the bulk of the Bowl season goes public, rather than each show being a scattershot part of the puzzle. Is there an awareness of that cultural element in planning a season? I like the idea of it’s part of our fabric as a community in terms of people look at as, “Here’s what I’m gonna be doing next year. If I’m a citizen here, if I’m a resident, part of my lifestyle that I enjoy about being there is having that facility. It’s part of what I do and what I like to do, or part of my activities as a human. How I’m existing on this planet includes fun and stimulating activities. It’s part of the summertime world that we have.”
Locals look forward to what the new Bowl season promises, as a whole and in terms of which shows appeal to particular demographics or age groups — although some shows span age and cultural definitions. Willie Nelson, for instance. Speaking of Willie, I always remember this moment in the Bowl bathroom where to one side of me they were talking about surfing, and on the other side, they were talking about Smith & Wesson. It was like a comedy. That’s good. That’s perfect.
Part of the challenge for you, I’m assuming, is creating a package that appeals to different demographics, isn’t it? If one were to look back at the composition of the seasons a long time ago, it looks a lot like classic rock, but at the time, those were more diverse shows than were recognized. Part of the fun now for me is — and it’s hard to put into words — is not having too much of any one thing. That doesn’t do us any good.
I always loved seeing band names coming to the Bowl that I’ve never heard of. You must be constantly listening and maybe being influenced by kids and your kids. Well, not so much my biological kids, but to a certain degree. But I learn stuff every day from my Goldenvoice family. I’m in constant communication with those at Goldenvoice who are the movers and shakers of talent acquisition there. There’s a lot of stuff I’m not aware of or hip to yet, and I try to educate myself quickly and efficiently. [Laughs.] And then I have to balance that out into a season.
Since the pandemic, the need to book further out has increased. It’s also because the building has become more in demand with the touring industry. More and more people want to play here. And with the show cap that we have, we have a total number of shows that we can’t exceed per season. The more savvy agents know they have to act quickly to get a date. You can’t wait around and think you’re gonna get an available date if you wait too long.
The word is out there that the Bowl has become a more in-demand place in the industry, particularly in Nashville.
You have been delving more into country bookings in recent seasons. It works well here. We’ve done well with it, and there are a lot of country artists who consider us a must-play if you’re on the West Coast.
Speaking of major country artists, it’s a big deal that Brad Paisley has played here — partly because of his occasional local residency. For that matter, we always assume artists the caliber and drawing power of Sting, Radiohead, James Taylor, or David Bowie played the “modestly scaled” Bowl because they liked the venue. Or are there other factors? Sting came back because he liked the venue. Radiohead comes back because they like the venue, and Radiohead also likes the vibe. I don’t mean just the ocean-view vibe, but the whole nature of the place hits a bullseye for Radiohead, in terms of how they wanna be perceived.
And their appearances become a badge of honor for the Bowl. Yeah, and it’s not like we put a menu out that they just happened to like the food selection. They got there and felt, “This is how we like shows to be run. We like the fact there’s no commerciality to the facility.” They’re not seeing AT&T or whatever on the sides of the stage. They appreciate that.
That’s Thom Yorke’s attitude at work. And the beauty of having this foundation is that they managed to make things work financially without having to sell ourselves out. Many other venues have little choice but to take a big sponsorship. The foundation can raise money as a nonprofit, and it allows the public, the promoter, and the bands not to have to pay for improvements.
And that must be a rare situation in the concert venue world, isn’t it? Yes, and that’s part of that team, that blending of nonprofit and for-profit that works so well. There has to be a good understanding so that there’s a balance.
Looking beyond the Bowl, you did a show at your old stomping grounds of Casa de la Raza, with Marlon Funaki, in 2024. Is there a sense of a full-circle situation for you now, coming back to smaller venues like Casa where you started out so many years ago, in addition to the Bowl workload? It’s a similar thing where it’s a community asset. The Casa is a community asset. The Bowl is a community asset. It enhances a whole bunch of lives. So many.
When we went into Casa for the show and I was there for two days and seeing all the stuff they’re doing, I felt that this place is rich in its contributions to the community. That’s part of what I like. What I do here is to figure out how we can contribute to the fabric of this community. It’s awesome. People can find happiness and joy and have their lives and their trajectories perhaps altered slightly by who they meet, what they see. They can sing along.
Actually, it reminds me of when we came back to doing shows in 2021, after the pandemic. We were dark for a couple years, one and a half seasons. And that fall, coming back in 2021 was just so good. Jackson Browne was the first musician, but we had some comedy to start that season, ’cause we can turn that around quickly.
During the first couple of shows that played, there were audible moans and groans of pleasure from the audience by just being outdoors and hearing live music again. It wasn’t like cheering for the song, per se. It was a real kind of guttural sound, at a different frequency than normal cheering or yelling.
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