UC Santa Cruz Amphitheater Gears Up for First Concert Since Renovation

On any given day, visitors to the University of California, Santa Cruz’s sprawling campus might stumble upon a grove of towering 150-foot-tall coastland redwood trees, a nesting white-tailed hawk, a handful of trailside yellow banana slugs or a full production concert attended by 2,800 music fans.

The latter would be courtesy of the historic on-campus Quarry Amphitheater, a natural limestone amphitheater that fell into disrepair in the 2000s and reopened in 2017 following a two-phase, $8 million capital improvement plan — before shutting down again due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the Quarry is officially relaunching as a concert venue on Oct. 12 with Kevin Morby Presents: This Is A Festival featuring Morby (formerly of Babies and Woods); singer-songwriter Jessica Pratt; Trevor Powers’ experimental-pop project Youth Lagoon; prolific Parisian-born drummer, composer and producer 3; beloved indie-rocker Ben Kweller; and rising hip-hop and alt-rock group Blackstarkids. Chris Black and Jason Stewart from the popular culture podcast How Long Gone will serve as emcees for the evening.

“The Quarry is such an incredible space and in looking to the future of the venue, we wanted to create a replica that looks like the original but holds its own with any other modern venue,” said Quarry Amphitheater GM Jose Reyes-Olivas, who works on behalf of UCSC and previously booked and helped produce the Stern Grove music festival in San Francisco.

Last month, the Quarry hosted a screening of which Reyes-Olivas says was “rebuilt…from the ground up,” has added a new load-bearing roof system, lighting trusses and motorized rigging. The venue doesn’t have a PA system; tours bring their own sound or rely on third-party backline companies for amplification, which Reyes-Olivas points out is also the case at nearby Berkeley, Calif.’s Greek Theater and the Mountain Winery in Saratoga, Calif.

Once viewed as a stopover for touring bands between the Bay Area and L.A., California’s Central Coast has since become an important music market on its own. Oakland company Ineffable manages a number of venues in Santa Cruz and coastal towns like Ventura and Monterey, while nearby Stanford University reopened its 8,000-capacity Frost Amphitheater in 2021.

The Quarry — which technically reopened last month with a special screening of the 1984 Talking Heads concert documentary Stop Making Sense — has agreed to a preferred booking agreement with Bay Area indie concert promoter Noise Pop Industries, though Reyes-Olivas tells Billboard the venue is an open facility available to qualifying concert promoters. Noise Pop, which was founded in 1993 as a $5 club night boasting a five-band bill inside San Francisco’s Kennel Club — now known as The Independent — has since grown into one of the Bay’s premier indie promoters, booking hundreds of bands at dozens of venues each year and serving as one of California’s best-known music showcases.

When it came to booking the Quarry, Morby “was definitely on the shortlist,” says Noise Pop CEO Michelle Swing. “We’re really big fans of Kevin and everything that he does…so we reached out to his team about curating a full day at the Quarry and he loved the idea.”

She added, “I think what’s fantastic is that the university is really investing in finding ways to bring more shows to the Quarry by bringing down costs and invested in the venue even further. We’re partnering with them to find the right shows that make sense for Santa Cruz music fans.”

Tickets for Kevin Morby Presents: This Is A Festival are on sale now via QuarryAmphitheater.com.