Matt Hill Really Burns Up the Stage at the Organ Pavilion August 14

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, August 14) I went to the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the latest “Twilight in the Park” concert featuring a local country-rock band called Matt Hill and the Black Spurs. Alas, I didn’t get the message that the concert was starting earlier than usual – at 6 p.m. instead of the 6:30 start time most of them have had this year – because, as it turned out, San Diego civic organist Raúl Prieto Ramírez needed the Organ Pavilion to rehearse his Monday night concert with a local pick-up symphony orchestra. I was especially ticked off at having missed the first song or two because what I did get to see and hear was easily the hottest Twilight in the Park concert I’ve been to this season. Matt Hill turned out to be an excellent singer and guitar player, throwing himself into the music with complete passion and abandon. He’s tall, with long, dark, curly hair, and his drummer looked so much like him I asked the woman running his merch table (who turned out to be his sister) if they were brothers. (She said no.) Hill had a simple four-piece lineup – himself on guitars (I use the plural because he had at least three of them, and in one song he actually switched instruments in the middle) plus an electric keyboardist, electric bassist, and drummer. I already could hear the band in full cry as I walked on the esplanade towards the Organ Pavilion, and the first song I got to hear in full was a Matt Hill original called “Strong Woman” written about and dedicated to his fiancée Carrie. He got points with me for not being afraid to date and eventually marry a strong woman, and I liked him even better when he said he and Carrie met while shopping at Vons. Oh, how I wished my husband Charles, who works as a grocery clerk at the Mission Hills Vons (though it’s recently rebranded itself as the company’s high-end branch, “Pavilions”), had been there to hear that!

Hill did another original, “Snake,” about an ex whom he seems to be on relatively good terms with (the title is not an insulting reference to her, but refers to an actual snake they saw while on a date in the desert together), but most of his set was covers: Journey’s “Western Destiny,” The Temptations’ (and the Rolling Stones’) “Just My Imagination,” the Stones’ “Tumbling Dice,” Alan Jackson’s train song “Good Time,” the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” the Kinks’ “All Day and All of the Night,” and as an encore The Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” I was a bit surprised by the last choice – if he were going to do a Paul McCartney Beatles song as his encore, I’d have expected something more hard-rocking, like “I’m Down” or “Helter Skelter” – but Matt Hill had the knack for covering a song while still being able to make it his own. He was able to add a hard-rock edge to “Hey Jude” while still remaining true to the original spirit of the song (and I couldn’t hear it without flashing back to the 1968 presentation of the British TV original performance of the Beatles’ version as it was introduced to U.S. audiences as part of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour). I was also impressed by his skill as a guitar player, especially his ability on “Hotel California” to simulate the two-guitar break on the Eagles’ version with just one instrument. About the only thing I could fault him on was the sheer length of his spoken intros; he did tend to drone on and on, telling anecdotes that were funny but far less amusing than he thought they were. But I really enjoyed the part of the concert I got to hear, especially the part towards the end of one of the later songs in which he lay on his back on the stage in the classic manner of Big Jay McNeely, the 1940’s R&B veteran whom Charles and I saw a couple of times at the Adams Avenue Street Fair. (On one year McNeely lay on the pavement in the middle of the street and blew his sax; the next year, alas, he was too weak to do that anymore.) Matt Hill turned in one of the most exciting shows I’ve seen all year, easily surpassing everyone else at Twilight in the Park, and if he’d been selling a CD I’d have bought it eagerly. Alas, so few people have CD players anymore there’s no money in that, and all his sister at his merch table was doing was selling pins and giving out business cards with his Web address, matthillandtheblackspurs.com.