Cabot’s Pueblo Museum, in Desert Hot Springs, is an architectural marvel. Early Desert Hot Springs homesteader Cabot Yerxa began building the pueblo house in 1941 to be both his home and a museum honoring Indigenous culture, incorporating artifacts and artworks from tribes, as well as scrap material found in the desert. The captivating structure boasts 150 windows, 65 doors and 35 rooms, and while the project was never completed, Cabot’s Pueblo Museum has become a historical landmark.
Now, the museum is a regular home of live music as well.
Through April, the new Pueblo Sessions series will take place once a month at Cabot’s Pueblo Museum, showcasing both national and local musicians, and spotlighting a variety of genres and musical worlds. At 6 p.m., Friday, Nov. 20, catch a synth-wave/dream-pop night co-headlined by HOLY WATER (Sacramento) and LANDROID (Landers), with other local support from Palm Shadow and MODESTY. The series is hosted by Vowel Productions, aka Steven Kippel and Alvaro Sandoval, and features a few collaborations with other local booking agencies. (Full disclosure: I am co-booking and performing at the Dec. 20 show, and I am being paid to help promote that show, via my Dunes Booking. This story will focus on the series as a whole, and the November date specifically.)
“I started Vowel several years ago, and I’ve been careful about what to do with it,” Kippel said during a recent phone interview. “I wasn’t just trying to book stuff randomly—I wanted to be thoughtful about it, so I was building a long-term plan.”
A friend connected Kippel to people at Cabot’s Pueblo Museum, who were looking to expand their programming.
“I went to the museum, walked around, got the idea of how these events would take place, and gave them a pitch—and they liked it,” he said. “Irene N. Rodríguez (executive director), Jeff Bowman (board president) and Haddon Libby (board vice president) especially have been really supportive, and haven’t been pushing their own programming. They are trusting us to bring in the right artists and partners.”
Kippel said he began looking for places to perform in the Coachella Valley after starting a band, Marshmallow Forestfire, back in 2000.
“As a lot of people know, there weren’t a lot of places to perform here in the desert, so it was coffee shops, open-mic things, and churches doing special events,” he said. “We’d always have to travel out to Anaheim, or Corona, or Riverside, around Southern California to have a place to play, and to see bands we wanted to see.”
Kippel soon teamed up with friend and roommate Christopher Cross to form Blackhart Productions and build up the local D.I.Y. music scene.
“We started with Steel Train at the YMCA, which is to me crazy, because that’s Jack Antonoff’s band, and he’s now winning every Grammyevery year,” he said. “This was the MySpace era of music, so we started booking through MySpace and expanded from there to more professional ways of doing business, and we did that for a long time. I think the last show that we did was in 2009, which was Motionless in White’s first headlining tour. Through those years, we booked at Cafe Abuelita in Indio, Ignition Cafe in Palm Springs, Rock-afire Pizza in Indio, and the Elks Lodge in Palm Springs, where we had the longest run. I also did a series of shows at the Southwest Community Church, which is now Wellspring Church in Indian Wells, called In Your Face, and those shows were massive.”
Blackhart Productions faced an all-too-familiar reality in the D.I.Y. scene, both back then and today: the shuttering of venues and supportive spaces.
“Basically, the places that you were able to get shows at were restaurants that were long in the tooth and looking to get business in, and they all ended up closing after a while, so you always had to look for a new place to play music at,” Kippel said.
“Cabot’s Pueblo is such a unique place that it’s kind of magical being there. I was feeling the energy of the place and imagining what kind of music would really enhance the evenings there.”
Pueblo Sessions co-creator Steven Kippel
Kippel stepped away from the music scene to start a family. As Kippel returns to booking local shows, he intends to work closely with the people keeping the desert’s music scene alive.
“You have Kickass Booking, Dunes Booking, Hot Stuff Booking and Luna Negra,” he said. “There are bunch of different people who are promoting and have their own thing, so coming back into promoting concerts in the desert, I don’t want to fight with anybody for stages or artists or anything. I’m trying to collaborate with these other people as much as possible, and just kind of grow the scene that way.”
Pueblo Sessions combines unique musicians with the captivating nature of the museum.
“Cabot’s Pueblo is such a unique place that it’s kind of magical being there,” Kippel said. “I was feeling the energy of the place and imagining what kind of music would really enhance the evenings there. I go to a lot of concerts—like, 20-plus concerts every year in a lot of different genres—so a lot of these bands that I look to were just openers for bigger bands, and regional bands that could come out and do these dates easily, and that would fit the vibe.”
The Nov. 20 show will kick off the series.
“The first show is a dark-wave, synth-wave show, which I think really fits the mood of the museum, which is kind of otherworldly in its feel,” Kippel said. “It was built over years off of just found materials in the desert, and it’s Hopi-inspired. … It’s this kind of Western meets Native American style. The sounds that I was looking to put in there are otherworldly types of sounds, kind of psychedelic in nature, or ethereal, but also with high energy.”
The main goal of Pueblo Sessions is to raise awareness for the museum the city of Desert Hot Springs.
“They have a mission, so we’re trying to adhere to their overarching mission, which is just to get people to visit the museum and have awareness of the museum,” Kippel shared. “It’s also owned by the city of Desert Hot Springs, so they have another mission of just getting people to come visit Desert Hot Springs. We are trying to promote a bit outside of the desert and get them to come visit, but also having it accessible for the local community, especially Desert Hot Springs.”
Of course, Kippel hopes that Pueblo Sessions will also help the music community.
“I’m really proud of getting some of the top artists in the desert together on the same stage, which you don’t see all the time,” he said. “They’re all all-ages shows, too, which is important to me, because I want the younger audience to see a band on a stage and be like, ‘That could be me,’ and want to start their own band—and grow the scene that way.”
The first Pueblo Sessions concert will take place at 6 p.m., Friday, Nov. 20, at Cabot’s Pueblo Museum, at 67616 Desert View Ave., in Desert Hot Springs, featuring HOLY WATER, LANDROID, Palm Shadow and MODESTY. Tickets are $22.22, or $54.02 for a VIP pass. A series pass is $128.21, or $318.98 for a VIP series pass. For tickets or more information, visit tickets.cabotsmuseum.org/e/pueblo-sessions-tickets-november2026/tickets.
