Every Exit Has a Story
Exploring one of California’s most overlooked — and remarkable — music histories along the southern section of its Central Coast
The text came just as I reached the on-ramp for Highway 101. It was from Reese, my daughter Maya’s boyfriend.
No message.
Just a Spotify link to the band America’s song “Ventura Highway.”
I smiled, tapped Play and merged onto the 101, beginning three days of exploring the southern portion of California’s Central Coast.
That familiar, swirling guitar line filled the car. It felt like the perfect soundtrack for the drive. Maybe a little cliché, but perfect, nonetheless. Over the next few days, I played it again and again. It became intimately tied to my experience. That song will forever be alive within me and rooted to stories that took on a true sense of place.
My wife, Tammy, was attending a training nearby, leaving me with a rental car and the freedom to explore the southern stretch of California’s Central Coast — far enough beyond the sprawl of Los Angeles that the pace slows, the coastline opens up, and beach towns, vineyards and small cities create a California all their own. The beaches, the vineyards and the laid-back pace were exactly what I’d hoped they’d be.
But that’s rarely what sends me down the rabbit hole. Whenever I visit someplace new, I find myself asking the same question:
What’s the music story here?
Some places answer immediately.
The Mississippi Delta proudly tells the world it’s the birthplace of the blues. Memphis has Beale Street. Nashville has Lower Broadway and the legendary Ryman. Chicago and New Orleans have built entire identities around the music that shaped them.
The southern part of California’s Central Coast doesn’t. Its musical history hides beneath everything else the region is famous for. And that made me even more curious.
I expected to find a few interesting venues and maybe a couple of good stories along the way. But Highway 101 became a thread connecting a story of theaters, record stores, fairgrounds and ordinary-looking buildings where some of the biggest names in American music once left their mark. It was something much bigger than I imagined. And the first clue was waiting in downtown Ventura.
The Ventura Theatre
Sometimes a building tells you it’s important before you understand why. That was the Ventura Theatre.
Standing at Chestnut and Main streets in downtown Ventura, the venue commands attention the way great movie palaces were designed to do. Even surrounded by shops, restaurants and everyday life, it feels like a destination. It looks like a place with stories to tell.
Built in 1928 as a Spanish Colonial Revival-style movie venue, the Ventura Theatre has survived nearly a century by continually reinventing itself. Like many historic theaters across America, it evolved from films to live performances, eventually becoming one of California’s most respected midsized concert venues.
When I arrived, the theater wasn’t open for visitors. The front doors were propped open, offering a glimpse into the lobby, but that was as far as anyone was allowed. So, I circled the outside of the building instead, peering through the entrance, walking past the stage door and around the load-in area where musicians and road crews have carried guitars, amplifiers and road cases before shows for decades.
I never actually saw the stage. I didn’t need to because my imagination filled in the blanks.
Jim Morrison arriving before a Doors show.
Johnny Cash walking backstage.
Pearl Jam unloading gear before the band became an arena phenomenon.
Van Halen.
Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Fugazi.
Different eras. Different audiences. The same backstage doors.
That’s one of the things I love about visiting places like this. Reading a list of performers online is one thing. Standing where they stood is something else entirely. Suddenly, history has a pulse. A backstage entrance. A loading dock. It becomes a place instead of a paragraph.
As I walked back toward Main Street, a new question entered my mind.
Ventura isn’t Los Angeles.
It isn’t San Francisco.
So, why had so many legendary artists made this theater a regular stop?
At first, I assumed the answer had something to do with the building itself, but it was more than that. And the answer was waiting a few miles away, on the walls of a record store.
The Posters on the Wall
A short while later, I pulled into the parking lot at Salzer’s Records on the east side of Ventura. Like any music fan, I enjoy wandering through independent record stores. I figured I’d browse for a while, maybe buy a record or two and continue to my next stop.
Instead, I walked into a discovery I didn’t see coming.
The first thing that caught my attention wasn’t the albums. It was a wall toward the back. Covered with concert posters, advertising shows that had taken place across the sourthern part of California’s Central Coast decades earlier.
One with the likeness of Jimi Hendrix caught my eye.
Then another. And another.
Before long, I wasn’t just admiring the artwork. I was reading every poster, studying the names, dates and venues. One legendary concert after another stared back at me — The Doors, Led Zeppelin, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, James Brown …
As I moved from poster to poster, another pattern emerged. Near the top of every one were three words: “Jim Salzer Presents.”
Who was Jim Salzer?
I looked around the store.
Salzer’s Records.
Of course.
I walked over to the counter.
“What can you tell me about Jim Salzer?” I asked.
The employee smiled and began telling the story.
Over the next several minutes, the posters on the wall took on an entirely different meaning. A few moments earlier, I’d simply been admiring a collection of incredible vintage concert posters. Now, I realized I was looking at the visual history of how so many of the biggest names of the rock and psychedelic era found their way to this part of the Central Coast.
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Jim Salzer wasn’t simply the owner of a record store. He had become one of the region’s most influential concert promoters, helping transform California’s Central Coast into a regular stop for many of the biggest touring acts of that period.
Salzer didn’t just book concerts. He built relationships. He spotted talent before many musicians became household names and convinced them to play communities they might otherwise have skipped. Over time, those concerts helped establish the Central Coast as an important stop between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
One of the favorite stories I learned involved Jimi Hendrix. During a visit to Salzer’s, Hendrix plugged into one of the Marshall amplifiers the store had begun carrying. In a published interview, Salzer told media that “Hendrix played so loudly that the pizza restaurant next door complained.” It’s one of those human stories that instantly transports you to another time — and I was standing in it.
By the time I stepped back outside, my plans had changed. I no longer wanted to simply visit historic music venues. I wanted to understand the world Jim Salzer had helped create.
That curiosity first led me to Santa Barbara’s Earl Warren Showgrounds, where many of the artists whose names I’d just seen on those posters once performed before thousands of fans. It eventually led me to the Ventura County Fairgrounds and even to the memory of Oxnard’s long-gone Starlight Ballroom.
I was following one man’s fingerprints across California’s Central Coast.
Where the Posters Led
When I left Salzer’s Records, I couldn’t stop thinking about those posters. They became my roadmap. So, I pointed the car north, en route to the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara.
The showgrounds look exactly like what they are — a county fairgrounds. Families come for horse shows, rodeos, community events and the annual county fair. Nothing about the place immediately suggests that, during the late 1960s, it became one of California’s most important stops for touring rock acts.
Quite a few of those concerts took place inside Warren Hall, an unassuming building that today hosts community events, exhibitions and gatherings. Standing outside, it was hard to imagine that Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Janis Joplin had once performed inside those walls.
And then it hit me.
It’s one thing to read that Led Zeppelin played Santa Barbara. It’s another to stand outside Warren Hall and realize this was the room. For a few remarkable years, Earl Warren Showgrounds became one of California’s premier medium-sized rock venues under Jim Salzer’s promotion.
From the outside, you’d never know. And Warren Hall wasn’t the end of the story. The deeper I looked, the bigger the story became.
The next morning, I found myself standing at one of the open gates of the Ventura County Fairgrounds, looking down a broad, palm-lined walkway that stretched past the ticket booths and into the grounds. Somewhere beyond those trees, another stage once welcomed the Beach Boys, Grateful Dead, and so many others.
The Grateful Dead stayed with me. The longer I stood there, the easier it became to picture those quiet walkways filling with people arriving from every direction. Their concerts drew together a community that often traveled from one show to the next, crossing state lines and social boundaries in search of another shared experience. For one evening, that community would have transformed these fairgrounds. The ticket booths, walkways and open spaces would have disappeared beneath thousands of people who were part of something larger than themselves. Standing there decades later, it was surprisingly easy to believe that all of it had happened right here.
By then, I wasn’t really following Jim Salzer anymore. I was following the music — and that trail eventually led me to a place unlike any I’d visited so far. In downtown Santa Barbara, for a couple of years, a tiny coffeehouse became one of California’s most unique and intimate listening rooms: The Bluebird Cafe.
The Bluebird
Before I ever boarded the plane for California, I had stumbled across a brief mention of a place called The Bluebird Cafe. It wasn’t a famous theater or an arena. Just a tiny coffeehouse in downtown Santa Barbara. For some reason, I couldn’t get it out of my head.
Maybe it was the idea that a place so small could have such an outsized place in music history. Maybe it was because almost nobody seemed to talk about it anymore. Whatever the reason, I knew that when I made it to Santa Barbara, I’d have to find it.
The address is 33 W. Anapamu Street. Today, it houses an art gallery. Standing on the sidewalk, I looked at the building for a long moment. There was nothing to suggest what this place had once been.
No marquee.
No historic marker.
No framed photographs.
People wandered past without giving it a second glance.
The windows now display artwork instead of gig posters. The front door opens into a gallery instead of a coffeehouse. But for a few short years in the early 1970s, this modest storefront became something special.
Peter Feldmann wasn’t trying to build the next Fillmore or Whisky a Go Go. He envisioned a gathering place where musicians and listeners (local and beyond) could sit just a few feet apart, share songs, swap stories and discover one another. The Bluebird became a crossroads where touring artists traveling between Los Angeles and San Francisco mixed with local musicians, all connected by a love of folk, blues and bluegrass. Several accounts I’ve read suggest the line between performer and audience disappeared.
One of the musicians who found his way there was Mississippi Fred McDowell, whose hill country blues from northern Mississippi drew from the foundation on which so much American roots music was built. The thought that music born on dusty back roads more than 2,000 miles away somehow ended up in this tiny coffeehouse on California’s Central Coast made the Bluebird seem even more extraordinary. And McDowell wasn’t the only one. Bill Monroe, considered by many to be the father of bluegrass, played here. So did Mance Lipscomb, Furry Lewis and countless others.
Different traditions. Different backgrounds. Different corners of America. All passing through one tiny coffeehouse in downtown Santa Barbara.
Standing there, it was easy to imagine them arriving with instrument cases in hand, pulling up a chair and settling into a room where the conversation was as much a part of the evening as the music.
The Bluebird, itself, was long gone. But after following its story for hundreds of miles, just standing in front of the space it had once occupied somehow felt like enough.
Just Beyond the Next Exit
I had barely scratched the surface. There were still stories waiting just beyond the next exit — and I knew it.
One place I never made it to was the Teatro Theatre in Oxnard.
I wish I had.
According to the employee I talked to at Salzer’s Records, the Teatro can easily be mistaken for just another old, closed movie house/venue. But behind those walls, a most unexpected chapter in modern music quietly unfolded.
In the late 1990s, producer Daniel Lanois saw something in the abandoned theater that everyone else had overlooked. Instead of renovating the building it into a conventional recording studio, he embraced the space for what it already was. The aging auditorium, empty seats and natural acoustics became part of the creative process, giving musicians a place that felt less like a recording studio and more like a live performance.
Willie Nelson recorded there and liked the experience so much he named the resulting album Teatro. Bob Dylan made the trip north from Malibu to record Time Out of Mind. U2 and Iggy Pop were drawn to the space as well. Years later, Neil Young recorded there.
All inside an abandoned theater in Oxnard, CA.
Somehow, that no longer surprised me.
I’d discovered that this southern stretch of California’s Central Coast has a habit of hiding remarkable music stories in places you’d least expect to find them. The Santa Barbara Bowl continues that tradition today, welcoming many of the world’s biggest artists to one of America’s most spectacular outdoor amphitheaters. A little farther inland, the Maverick Saloon in Santa Ynez reminds visitors that music doesn’t always need a massive stage. For more than 60 years, musicians have gathered there in an intimate Old West dance hall where country, bluegrass, Americana, folk and roots music remain as much a part of the community as the town itself.
The farther I drove, the more it seemed every exit had another story to tell.
I simply ran out of time.
Every Exit Has a Story
Over three days, I’d discovered that the music history wasn’t concentrated in one legendary venue or one town in this part of the Central Coast. It was scattered across theaters, fairgrounds, coffeehouses, record stores and old buildings that most people pass without a second glance. Finding it simply required taking the next exit and asking another question.
That evening, on the drive back to my Airbnb, “Ventura Highway” came on one last time.
I smiled, turned it up and kept driving.
The song hadn’t changed.
But now every exit has a story.
