So long, Sleep Train Amphitheatre! Welcome, Mattress Firm Amphitheatre!

Feb. 16, 2017 12:02 PM PT

Say goodbye, to Sleep Train Amphitheatre - not the venue, the name.

Effective immediately, Sleep Train Amphitheatre - San Diego County’s largest outdoor concert venue - will be known as Mattress Firm Amphitheatre. The venue is owned and operated by Live Nation, the world’s largest promoter of concerts and live entertainment events.

The name change is the culmination of Mattress Firm’s acquisition of Sleep Train Mattress, the West Coast’s leading mattress retailer.

All 318 Sleep Train retail stores are being be re-branded as Mattress Firm outlets and will become part of the 3,500-store national Mattress Firm chain. Mattress Firm bought Sleep Train for $425 million in late 2014.

“We are pleased to continue our partnership with Sleep Train Mattresses, now Mattress Firm, at the amphitheater in Chula Vista,” Live Nation San Diego President Candace Mandracia said Thursday morning.

This is the fourth name change for the sprawling, nearly 20,000-capacity concert venue in Chula Vista, which opened in 1998 as Coors Amphitheatre. Over the years, the venue has hosted concerts by numerous bands and solo artists, including Elton John, Radiohead, the Spice Girls, Santana, the Dave Matthews Band, Jimmy Buffett, James Taylor, Brad Paisley, No Doubt, Eminem, Neil Diamond and the San Diego bands blink-182 and Slightly Stoopid.

In 2008, Cricket Communications - a division of San Diego-based Leap Wireless - secured naming rights to Coors Amphitheatre and renamed it Cricket Wireless Amphitheatre.

In 2013, Cricket was succeeded by Sleep Train, after the mattress company bought naming rights to the venue in a five-year agreement that runs through 2018.

Sleep Train also had naming rights to several other California venues, including Sleep Train Pavilion in Concord, which is now Concord Pavilion, and Sleep Train Arena in Sacramento, where the naming rights contract has now expired.

Music

George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”