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Belly Up Tavern 17 results for Belly Up Tavern

Everything at Belly Up Tavern — including past events

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3 days away

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Dinosaur Jr. with Stef Chura

In 4 days · Oct 11 $49.50+ Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Loud can be tender - a wall of distortion so thick it gives you somewhere to hide while J Mascis mumbles the saddest, sweetest thing you have ever heard underneath it. Dinosaur Jr. invented a lot of that: the template for every band that ever buried a broken heart under a guitar solo, forty years deep and still playing at a volume that rearranges your organs. In the close quarters of the Belly Up, that famous three-amp roar becomes a physical fact, and the crowd — lifers in faded shirts, kids discovering it new — just leans into the wave together. Stef Chura opens. Bring earplugs and do not use them. Sunday, October 11, 2026, 6:30pm, Solana Beach, 21+. Come stand inside the loudest tenderness in rock and let it drown out, for a couple hours, whatever you walked in carrying. Bring the friend who taught you what a fuzz pedal was, or the kid who needs to learn — this is the source.

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5 days away

Deer Tick

In 6 days · Oct 13 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Certain bands sound like the third hour of a night that was supposed to end two hours ago, and this is the defining example. The records swing between tender and completely unhinged, sometimes inside one song, and live that ratio is decided in the moment rather than in advance. John McCauley's voice is a genuinely damaged instrument — shredded in a way that makes the sweet songs land harder because you can hear what it costs him to sing them quietly. There is no setlist discipline to speak of. People who have seen them four times have seen four different bands. A Tuesday out in North County. Doors at seven, music at eight. October 13, Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave. Bring the friend you have had a genuinely bad night with and stayed friends after. The bands that trade on that specific ragged warmth almost always play out here rather than downtown, for reasons nobody has ever adequately explained.

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12 days away

Melvins

In 13 days · Oct 20 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Forty-plus years in, the band that helped invent the tempo everybody else eventually slowed down to is still playing rooms with a bar along one wall. What gets lost in the lineage talk is how strange they actually are. The heaviness is real, but so is the perversity — songs that refuse to arrive, drum patterns that seem designed to irritate, an unwillingness to ever play the obvious version of anything. Buzz Osborne has been steering this for four decades with no visible interest in being liked, and the result is a discography most people find via somebody else insisting. Solana Beach, which is a genuinely funny place for this to happen. Doors at seven, music at eight. October 20, Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave. Bring whoever handed you the record originally. North County quietly gets a share of the loudest touring bands in the world, largely because this one room has been booking them since the seventies.

Fitz and the Tantrums — Picking Up The Pieces In Its Entirety

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26 days away

Fitz and the Tantrums — Picking Up The Pieces In Its Entirety

Nov 3, 2026 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Some albums sound better in a room that is too small for them. Picking Up The Pieces was Fitz and the Tantrums' debut — the one recorded before arena tours and festival main stages, when the songs still smelled like the Silverlake bars where they were written. Tonight the band plays the entire album front to back in a 600-capacity venue, which means the horn section that sounded big on record is going to sound enormous in person. There is a particular kind of joy that happens when a band returns to the scale where their music was born, and every person in the room knows it. The fans who were there in 2010 get to relive it; the ones who discovered the band later finally get to feel what it was like at the beginning. This is the rare show where nostalgia is not a crutch — it is the point, and it only works because the songs were good enough to earn it. $45 advance. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach. Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 7:30 PM.

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32 days away

King Buffalo, L.A. Witch

Nov 9, 2026 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Somewhere between the second and third minute of a King Buffalo song, the riff stops being a riff and becomes a landscape — a low desert where the air bends and the horizon never arrives. The Rochester trio has built a career on instrumental passages that reward patience with payoffs that hit harder for the wait, psychedelic rock heavy enough to rearrange the furniture in your chest. Tonight they bring it to the Belly Up with L.A. Witch, whose garage-rock crackle is the photographic negative of Buffalo's expansive drone: tight, sharp, and lit from underneath. Together the two bands create a night that swings between desert-vast psychedelia and stripped-wire punk energy — a rare pairing you will not find on any algorithm's playlist. The crowd that shows up for this kind of bill knows each other by sight if not by name, and on a Monday night in Solana Beach the room will belong entirely to them. General admission $25. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach. Monday, November 9, 2026.

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54 days away

The Residents — Eskimo Live!

Dec 1, 2026 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

For fifty years The Residents have made music that refuses to explain itself — eyeball-helmeted, genre-allergic, and committed to the idea that art should make you uncomfortable in ways you cannot quite name. Eskimo Live! resurrects one of their strangest works: a 1979 concept album imagining the interior lives of Arctic peoples, rendered through atonal chanting, wind-machine drones, and rhythms that sound like they were recorded inside an iceberg. Hearing it on a studio album is disorienting. Hearing it performed live, in a room, with people around you who chose to be there on a Tuesday night — that is something else entirely. This is the final date of the rescheduled North American tour, which means every accumulated improvisation and accident from the previous months collapses into one last performance. Opening the night is Rushadicus the Infamous Cello Goblín, which is exactly the kind of opener The Residents deserve. $35 advance, general admission seating. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach. Tuesday, December 1, 2026, 7:00 PM.

Squirrel Nut Zippers — Christmas Caravan 2026

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55 days away

Squirrel Nut Zippers — Christmas Caravan 2026

Dec 2, 2026 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

December has a sound, and for a certain kind of person it is not Bing Crosby or Mariah Carey — it is a trombone sliding into a minor key while a standup bass walks a line that makes you want to order a whiskey neat in a room full of strangers. The Squirrel Nut Zippers have been making that version of the holidays real since the mid-nineties, when their hot jazz revival turned a generation of alt-rock kids into swing dancers overnight. The Christmas Caravan is their annual lap through the country, and it lands at the Belly Up on a Wednesday night — the kind of midweek show where the audience skews toward people who planned this, not people who stumbled in. Expect brass, expect stomp, expect the kind of warmth that only happens when the music is older than everyone playing it and the room is small enough that the bell of the trombone is pointed directly at your table. $45 advance. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach. Wednesday, December 2, 2026, 7:30 PM.

Mack Geiger — When It's Pouring 2026 Tour

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60 days away

Mack Geiger — When It's Pouring 2026 Tour

Dec 7, 2026 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Monday nights were not built for staying home — they were built for the kind of show where the artist is playing the last date of the tour and has nothing left to save. Mack Geiger closes out his When It's Pouring Tour at the Belly Up, and there is a reason tour-enders at intimate venues carry a reputation: the songs are looser, the stories between them are longer, and the room gets a version of the artist that the Friday-night crowds never see. Geiger's brand of country leans into the storytelling tradition — the kind where every lyric sounds like it was pulled from a conversation overheard at a diner at 2 AM, honest enough to sting and melodic enough to hum on the drive home. His debut record landed him on major country playlists, and the live show is where that raw, unpolished energy translates into something you feel in the room, not just in your headphones. $25 advance. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach. Monday, December 7, 2026, 8:00 PM.

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Lettuce at Belly Up

Sep 11, 2026 $49.50-$86 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

You walk into the room and the bass player is already deep into something that makes your hips move before your brain catches up. The horns are stacked three deep and playing like they're having a private conversation that just happens to be the best thing you've ever overheard. The drummer is grinning. Everyone on stage is grinning. You look around and realize every single person in this venue is moving. Lettuce has been doing this for over twenty-five years — a funk and soul collective out of Boston's Berklee College of Music that turned a jam session into a career, a six-piece brass-heavy groove machine that makes you wonder why anyone would ever sit down at a concert. They don't do ballads. They don't do slow songs. They walk on stage and the room becomes a dance floor whether it was built to be one or not. Belly Up on a Friday night is the exact right container for this energy. Six hundred people, standing room, and a band that treats every show like the last house party of the summer. The kind of night where your shirt is soaked by the encore and you don't remember driving home. Belly Up Tavern, Solana Beach. GA $49.50.

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Talib Kweli at Belly Up

Sep 17, 2026 $35-$62 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Picture the hip-hop show where nobody is looking at their phone. The MC says a line and three hundred people finish it for him — not because they memorized it, but because it lives in the part of their brain where convictions are stored. The beat drops and the room exhales together because this is the sound that taught them what bars actually meant. Talib Kweli is the reason a generation of hip-hop fans learned to care about lyrics first. From Black Star with Mos Def to the solo catalog that spans two decades of conscious, unflinching, word-dense rap, Kweli built a career on the premise that hip-hop could be smart and still hit hard. He didn't compromise. The audience that stayed with him didn't compromise either. Belly Up on a Thursday night for Talib Kweli is a room full of people who own vinyl they won't lend out. Who have opinions about Reflection Eternal. Who will drive to Solana Beach on a weeknight because some shows you don't wait for the weekend. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach, CA 92075. Thursday, September 17, 2026. Tickets from $35.

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Built to Spill at Belly Up Tavern

Aug 29, 2026 $35-$45 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Some guitar leads earn the right to go on as long as they feel like going on, and Doug Martsch's are the argument for the whole practice. Melodic, patient, loud enough to stay honest across a road trip's worth of miles. He has been running the Boise catalog since 1992, a band that built its following one drive at a time instead of one radio spin at a time, which is why this room fills with people who own the records on vinyl and are now in their forties, standing beside the ones who learned the catalog from them. Belly Up is the right size for that in this county: six hundred capacity, close enough to read the setlist taped to the floor, a room where nobody is more than a few rows from anything. Bring the friend who put There's Nothing Wrong With Love on every mixtape they ever made for anybody. They have been waiting a very long time to hear it in a room this size.

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Mason Jennings with Jack Symes at Belly Up

Aug 26, 2026 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Some musicians build stadiums. Mason Jennings builds living rooms that happen to hold three hundred people. He has spent twenty-five years writing songs that sound like they were always there, waiting in the walls of some cabin you have not visited yet — folk melodies that move at the speed of a long exhale, lyrics that sit with you the way a good conversation does after the other person has gone home. The Belly Up in Solana Beach is the ideal vessel for this. Cedar walls, low ceiling, the Pacific a block away. There is no bad seat and no seat that lets you hide. When Jennings plays here, the room becomes the song — you can hear the breath before the note, the silence after the last chord that nobody wants to break. Jack Symes opens, bringing his own brand of quiet intensity. GA tickets are twenty-five dollars in advance, thirty at the door. Reserved loft seats available at forty-four. The show starts at seven, which means you can be sitting on the beach in Solana by nine-thirty, still carrying whatever he put in you. 143 South Cedros Avenue.

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Ani DiFranco at Belly Up

Aug 11, 2026 $49-$86 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Somewhere around your nineteenth birthday, a voice came through a borrowed speaker and rearranged something in you before you had the vocabulary to say what. It sounded like someone had taken every feeling you'd been told was too much and turned it into a guitar tuning. Ani DiFranco has been that voice for thirty years. She built her own label before the phrase 'independent artist' existed as a career path. She sold millions of records out of a P.O. box in Buffalo. She plays guitar like she's trying to win an argument with it, and she writes lyrics that make you feel like she overheard the conversation you were having with yourself at 2 AM. Belly Up in Solana Beach is the kind of room where the stage is close enough that you can see the calluses on the guitarist's fingers. It holds maybe 600 people. When the artist is Ani DiFranco, those 600 people came alone and leave feeling like they showed up with their whole life story and someone finally read it back to them. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach, CA 92075. Tuesday, August 11, 2026. Doors 7 PM, show 8 PM. Tickets from $49.

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Soul Asylum at Belly Up

Aug 16, 2026 $30-$53 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

A guitar riff lives in the muscle memory of everyone who grew up in the nineties — a sound that meant summer windows rolled down, the DJ not talking over the intro, and the feeling that the world was simultaneously falling apart and completely fine. That riff belongs to Soul Asylum. Dave Pirner and the band have been playing since 1981, longer than most of their fans have been alive. They survived the grunge era by not being grunge — they were Minneapolis rock, bar-band loud, college-radio scrappy, and 'Runaway Train' just happened to be the song that crossed over into every living room in America. But the people who show up to a Belly Up show in 2026 aren't there for the hit. They're there for the thirty other songs that never left their rotation. Belly Up in Solana Beach is the right room for this. It holds 600 and the stage is eye level. You can smell the beer and hear the amp hum between songs. Sunday night, August 16. The people in this room will know every word to songs that never charted. Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave, Solana Beach, CA 92075. Sunday, August 16, 2026. Tickets available at the box office and online.

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Tortoise at Belly Up Tavern

Aug 1, 2026 $30-$35 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

There was a stretch of the nineties when a handful of bands decided instrumental rock could be patient -- no vocals, no hurry, just musicians listening to each other build something -- and almost every band that came after learned the shape of it from this one. Tortoise has been at it since 1990, the Chicago post-rock catalog that taught the genre what it could be when nobody was rushing. Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach is exactly the scale for it: six hundred capacity, the venue that books the legends the radio missed and the audience already loved. Bring the person who owns TNT and Standards on vinyl -- and the room will be full of them, plus the people who learned about Tortoise from those people. Saturday, August 1. Doors at seven, music at eight. Thirty to thirty-five dollars at the door. The drive from LA is two hours; people make it without complaining.

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Quicksand with Bane and Soul Blind at Belly Up Tavern

Aug 12, 2026 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Heavy and melodic were supposed to be opposites. Quicksand has spent thirty years quietly demonstrating that whoever decided that had not thought it all the way through. Walter Schreifels came up in the late-eighties New York hardcore scene and carried its weight into songs that lodge in your chest and refuse to leave. The people who got it then never let go, which is what turns a night like this into a reunion as much as a show: the friend who put you onto 'Slip' in the nineties, the coworker you never suspected was in the scene, forty-somethings who still know every word, and kids finding it for the first time. Bane and Soul Blind open, which is less a warm-up than a running start. The Belly Up in Solana Beach, a weeknight, doors early. This is a 'we have to go' text, not a 'maybe.' Send it as the former.

This Happened

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Saxsquatch: Party Animal Tour

Apr 16, 2026 From $22 Belly Up Tavern, 143 S Cedros Ave,…

Imagine a nine-foot sasquatch stepping onto the Belly Up stage and proceeding to absolutely melt the room with saxophone-driven funk while the crowd loses all composure. That's the premise. That's the show. Saxsquatch on April 16 in Solana Beach is the most fun you will have at a live event this year — no pretension, no opener you'll sit through, just controlled chaos from the first note. Eight dollars in Uber, priceless in everything else.

While you are looking Different scene, same night out.

Coming Soon

2 days away

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Y La Bamba

In 3 days · Oct 10 Lodge Room, 104 N Avenue 56, Los A…

Writing in two languages inside one song is not a stylistic choice for everybody who does it — for some people it is simply how thinking works, and the music that comes out of that is harder to categorize and considerably more honest. Luz Elena Mendoza Ramos makes records about faith, family and being Mexican-American in the Pacific Northwest, built on folk structures that keep dissolving into something more experimental. The voice is the instrument; live it goes places the recordings only hint at. Their audience is devoted in a way that suggests the songs did real work for people. Highland Park's upstairs Masonic hall, wood floors, a balcony, a few hundred capacity. Music at 8:00 PM at 104 N Avenue 56, a Saturday. Rooms on the eastside where this music lands are full of people who have been waiting a long time to hear their own two languages sung back at them.

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17 days away

Jodeci

Oct 25, 2026 YouTube Theater, 1011 Stadium Dr, …

Certain records were never really about romance so much as about being wanted with an intensity that felt slightly unsafe, and for a generation that record had four men from Charlotte on it in leather. Jodeci were the rougher answer to the smooth thing happening around them, and thirty-five years later the songs have not softened - they still sound like somebody begging. What makes an anniversary tour for this music worth going to is the crowd: grown people who will treat every intro like a personal announcement, and who are not remotely self-conscious about it. R&B nostalgia in Los Angeles fills rooms that critics stopped writing about decades ago, which is why this will not show up in the listings you read. Go with whoever you would not be embarrassed to be emotional in front of. Sunday the 25th of October at eight, and the crowd that turns up for this will be at the next one too, because these tours keep going around.

Gary Clark Jr. at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay — Night 1

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19 days away

Gary Clark Jr. at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay — Night 1

Oct 27, 2026 2241 Shelter Island Dr, San Diego,…

Gary Clark Jr. plays guitar the way a thunderstorm rolls across a Texas plain — slow at first, building, inevitable, and by the time it fully arrives you have forgotten that you were ever dry. The two-night stand at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay puts one of the most important guitarists of his generation in a room that was designed for exactly this: close quarters, harbor acoustics, and a crowd that came to listen, not to be seen. The phone-free Yondr pouch policy means the room is full of people watching instead of filming, which is the only way to experience a performer whose gift is making you forget anything exists outside the notes. General Admission, standing room only. Humphreys is a cashless venue, and the marina setting on Shelter Island makes the walk in feel like part of the show. Monday, October 27. Doors at 6:30 PM, show at 7:30 PM.

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20 days away

Mdou Moctar | Fully Seated

Oct 28, 2026 Ventura Music Hall, 1888 E Thompso…

The guitar solo fell out of fashion in America roughly the same decade it became the central instrument of a music scene in the Sahara, played on gear rigged to run off whatever power was available and traded between phones on memory cards rather than sold. Moctar came up in that circuit, in Tuareg, and the band he tours with plays fast enough that people who came expecting something meditative spend the night recalibrating. Comparisons to Hendrix get made constantly and are not really wrong, though they undersell how much of this is a rhythm section doing something unfamiliar underneath. This particular date is seated, which changes the experience — it puts the attention on the playing rather than the room, and for this band that is arguably the better version. Music at 8:00 PM in Ventura on East Thompson Boulevard. Anybody who has followed the West African guitar circuit for a while will tell you these tours are rare and the recordings do not prepare you.

Bahamas: Industrial Sport & Sound with Sister Ray — Belly Up, Solana Beach

Coming Soon

31 days away

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Bahamas: Industrial Sport & Sound with Sister Ray — Belly Up, Solana Beach

Nov 8, 2026 Belly Up, 143 S. Cedros Ave, Solan…

Afie Jurvanen writes songs that sound like the last hour of a house party where everyone who is left actually likes each other. Under the name Bahamas, the Canadian songwriter has spent a decade and a half making guitar-driven indie that is warm without being soft, funny without trying, and honest in the way that only comes from someone who has stopped performing honesty and started just being it. The Industrial Sport & Sound tour brings Bahamas to Belly Up in Solana Beach — a room that was built for exactly this kind of show. Low ceilings. Good sound. The kind of venue where the bartender knows the setlist and the crowd is two drinks past pretending they did not come alone. Sister Ray opens with their own brand of textured indie rock. This is the Sunday night show you almost talk yourself out of, and then you go, and then you remember why you live here. Belly Up, 143 S. Cedros Ave, Solana Beach, CA 92075. Sunday, November 8, 2026. 8:00 PM. Belly Up books rooms like this most weeks of the year, and the people who come for the venue rather than the name are rarely sorry.

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44 days away

Sure Fire Soul Ensemble, The Styletones

Nov 21 – Nov 22, 2026 The Casbah, 2501 Kettner Blvd, San…

Instrumental soul is music for people who have run out of things to say and would rather not be sung at about it. No lyrics to argue with. Just a Hammond organ, a horn section, and a rhythm section that has clearly played together for years. Sure Fire Soul Ensemble are from here — a San Diego band cut from the same cloth as the Daptone records out of Brooklyn, playing deep funk and boogaloo with the tape hiss left in on purpose. They record to analog, which is the sort of detail that could be affectation and in their case audibly is not; the records sound like they were found rather than made. The Styletones share the bill and the same lineage. This is a local band on a local stage in front of people who have watched them get good over a decade. Those nights are different, and everybody in the room knows it. Doors at eight on Saturday the twenty-first of November; the band goes on at nine.

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