Concerts in Los Angeles are an outdoor proposition for a much larger share of the year than in almost any other American city, and the range of what outdoors means here is unusually wide. It runs from a hillside amphitheatre seating eighteen thousand with a picnic culture attached, through gardens and museum courtyards, down to a back lot behind a bar in the east of the city with a hundred people standing on gravel. All of these are the same season.
Outdoor shows here get genuinely cold after sunset. Ask Karpo what the temperature will be at the venue tonight.
The Hollywood Bowl, which is its own institution
The Bowl runs a full summer season across classical, jazz, film scores and popular music, and it is the defining Los Angeles cultural experience for good reason. The picnic tradition is real and permitted — people bring food and, in most seating sections, wine — and arriving early to eat on the grounds is half the point. The cheap bench seats at the very top are a long way from the stage and still a good evening.
The one thing to plan properly is getting there. Parking is stacked, which means you leave when the cars in front of you leave, and the park-and-ride shuttles from various points around the city are the standard local solution. Nobody who goes regularly drives to the Bowl.
The Greek, the Ford and the mid-size outdoor rooms
The Greek Theatre in Griffith Park is the other great outdoor venue — smaller than the Bowl, tucked into the hillside, with the same stacked parking problem and the same shuttle solution. It has a more contemporary booking policy and the sightlines are good throughout.
The Ford, across the freeway from the Bowl, is the underrated one. It is small, it is set against a hillside of natural chaparral, and it programmes a genuinely eclectic season heavy on music from the city's own communities. It is the best outdoor room in Los Angeles for anyone who would rather see something they have not heard of in a space that seats a thousand, and the ticket prices reflect the scale rather than the location.
Rooftops, gardens and courtyards
The rooftop concert is a Los Angeles cliché that is better in practice than its reputation, provided you understand two things. The first is that it gets cold — the temperature drop after sunset here is severe and consistent, and a rooftop in June at ten at night is genuinely chilly. The second is that sound on a rooftop is compromised by definition, so these events are social rather than acoustic occasions.
The garden and courtyard series are the better version. Several museums, botanical gardens and historic properties run summer music programming in enclosed outdoor spaces with proper sound, at a scale of a few hundred people. These sell out quietly and rarely appear on general listings.
Back lots, parking lots and the DIY end
The most interesting outdoor shows in this city happen in spaces that are not venues. Back lots behind bars in Highland Park and Frogtown, warehouse yards in the industrial east, parking lots repurposed for an evening. These are advertised on social accounts and flyers, cost very little, and are where the city's actual music scene overlaps with its actual social life. The bills tend to be four or five local acts, which is the format at its most useful for finding something new.
They are also, by nature, unreliable — permits, neighbours and weather all intervene. Going to one requires accepting that it may not happen, which is a reasonable trade for what it costs. Checking the account that announced it on the day itself is the minimum due diligence.
Cemeteries, beaches and the borrowed spaces
Two Los Angeles formats deserve specific mention because they exist almost nowhere else. The cemetery screenings and concerts — held on lawns among the headstones of the film industry's own dead — are a genuinely strange and rather beautiful summer institution, ticketed but cheap, with a picnic culture attached. And the beach concert series in several of the coastal cities put a stage on the sand for free, most evenings through the summer.
Both are examples of the same local habit: Los Angeles will programme music into any flat outdoor surface it can find. Parking lots, plazas, rooftops, gardens, lawns, back yards. The climate makes it possible and the sprawl makes it necessary, since almost every neighbourhood ends up building its own version rather than travelling to a central one.
The season, and what it actually means
The main outdoor season runs from roughly late spring through October, which is longer than most places, but the shoulders are deceptive. Marine layer in May and June means overcast, cool evenings on the west side of the city while the valleys are clear. October can be the best month of the year for this, warm and dry with the summer crowds gone.
Winter does not entirely stop it. Daytime outdoor shows happen year-round here, and the rain season is short enough that an outdoor event in February is a reasonable gamble. The thing that stops outdoor concerts in Los Angeles is not cold, it is the evening temperature drop, and that is a clothing problem rather than a scheduling one. Bring a jacket you would not otherwise bring and the season effectively extends by two months in both directions.
Tags: #LosAngeles #ConcertsLA #HollywoodBowl #GreekTheatre #FordTheatre #OutdoorConcerts #RooftopShows #HighlandPark #LiveMusicLA #SummerLA #SoCal #Amphitheatre #Nights
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Ask Karpo first
Ask Karpo which outdoor concerts near you in Los Angeles are on this week, what the shuttle or parking situation is, and how cold it will be by the encore.
