Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam, Kings of Leon to headline Ohana Festival in Dana Point after postponing 2020 edition

The coronavirus pandemic shuttered last year’s Ohana, but the three-day music marathon is set for September return

San Diego Union-Tribune

May 12, 2021 1:50 PM PT

After being postponed last year because of the coronavirus pandemic, the fifth annual Ohana Festival will return to Dana Point this fall.

The Sept. 24-26 lineup will feature the same three headlining artists — Eddie Vedder, Pearl Jam and Kings of Leon — that had been scheduled to perform the 2020 edition.

All told, nearly three dozen of the performers booked for last year’s lineup are back on board this year, including My Morning Jacket, Maggie Rogers, Sharon Van Etten and guitar-playing San Diego surfing legend Rob Machado.

Only a handful of the postponed 2020 acts, most notably The Pretenders and Broken Social Scene, are missing from the 2021 roster, which now includes such new additions as Brandi Carlile, Black Pumas and Spoon. The full lineup appears below.

The three-day festival, which takes place at Doheny State Beach, is an all-ages affair. It was co-founded in 2016 by Pearl Jam singer/guitarist Vedder, who grew up nearby in San Diego’s North County. Pearl Jam drummer Matt Cameron is a San Diego native, while the band’s guitarist, Mike McCready, is a former Del Mar resident.

Pearl Jam’s 2020 North American “Gigaton” tour, which was to have included a San Diego concert in April 2020, was canceled because of the pandemic. Other than its upcoming Ohana performance, the band’s only scheduled 2021 show thus far is a Sept. 18 festival date in New Jersey.

Tickets for the 2021 Ohana Festival went on sale in March, although the performance lineup was only announced today. Multi-day tickets and VIP packages have all sold out. Single-day tickets are priced at $138.50 each, plus $26.50 in service charges, and are available at ohanafest.frontgatetickets.com.

A portion of the proceeds from Ohana will benefit the San Onofre Parks Foundation and the Doheny State Beach Foundation. Other participating charities include the Rob Machado Foundation, Sea Legacy, the Surfrider Foundation’s South Orange County chapter, WSL PURE and the Los Cerritos Wetlands Land Trust.

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.”