The Spirit Club on Buenos Avenue, a run-in with Hunter S. Thompson in Ocean Beach, an MTV wedding in Chula Vista and the radio station that thought he lived in a van down by the river. Inducted into the San Diego Music Hall of Fame October 16, 2026.
The night before the 1988 Super Bowl, Hunter S. Thompson came apart on a stage downtown. Thomas K. Arnold of the San Diego Reader was driving him that weekend, and he remembers stopping afterward at Liticker's Liquor on Voltaire Street in Ocean Beach. Mojo Nixon was in the store. Liticker's is still there.
Nixon had come to San Diego in February 1981, a 23 year old from Danville, Virginia, named Kirby McMillan, following a college girlfriend. She did not last. He stayed. He got married at a Chula Vista go-kart track with an MTV crew filming, and he started out in a club on Buenos Avenue that played its last show in August 2026.
The San Diego Music Hall of Fame named him to its 2026 class, two years after his death, with the induction set for October 16, 2026.
Plenty has been written about his records. This page is about where he spent his San Diego years, in the order he got to them.
Two things get repeated about Mojo Nixon in San Diego that the record does not support.
He was not here in the 1970s. His own published timeline puts him at Miami University in Ohio until 1979, briefly in England hoping to join the Clash, and then in Denver in 1980, where he worked for VISTA. The one punk band he ever fronted was there, in Denver. It was called Zebra 123, and according to Gerald Brennan's entry in Contemporary Musicians, the Secret Service questioned it over a show it called the "Assassination Ball."
And San Diego never really called him punk. The Times of San Diego, announcing his induction, calls him "an eccentric rockabilly artist." The San Diego Reader called him "the local roots-rocker." Punk was in the attitude. The music was loud, fast, blues-soaked rock and roll.
The late 1970s San Diego punk scene was real, though, and it is part of this story. One of its pioneering bands, the Penetrators, goes into the Hall of Fame the same night he does. Their drummer, Dan McLain, became Country Dick Montana. And Country Dick is the reason Mojo Nixon stayed.
His own timeline is blunt about why he came. He followed a college girlfriend here in February 1981. By August, by his account, she was gone, driven off by his rule that only Howlin' Wolf records could go on the turntable.
On September 2, 1981, he met "fellow San Diego musician and de-mentor Country Dick Montana." A month later he went to see Country Dick's band, Country Dick and the Snuggle Bunnies, at what his timeline calls a "neo-strip joint," and on October 1 he decided to stay in San Diego.
In October 1982 he left San Diego with two friends on bicycles, headed for Danville. In New Orleans, according to his own timeline, he had what he called the "Mojo Nixon Revelation." In January 1983 he was back in San Diego to share it with Country Dick.
Brennan's encyclopedia entry tells the next part differently. It has Nixon working as a state park ranger in North Carolina and coming back to San Diego only after nearly drowning in a river in August 1983. The two versions do not fit together. What follows uses his own dates.
On April 15, 1983, he started playing with Skid Roper at the Spirit Club on Buenos Avenue in Bay Park. His timeline calls it "ultra-sleazy" and says it inspired "Where The Hell's My Money."
Skid Roper was a National City native, according to the Times of San Diego, and had been one of Country Dick's Snuggle Bunnies. He played a washboard. Brennan reports that the washboard was because he could not afford a drum kit.
The Spirit had opened in 1976 as the Spirit of '76, and over the years it booked R.E.M., the Bangles, INXS and Sonic Youth, according to the Union-Tribune. In 1995 Max Paul took it over and renamed it Brick by Brick, at 1130 Buenos Avenue.
His timeline has him meeting his future wife, Adaire, on October 4, 1983, "in the parking lot of Bodies dive bar." He was wearing a dress at the time. He had just played there.
Around the same time, guitarist Jerry Raney first saw him at the Spring Valley Inn. Raney told the San Diego Reader in 2024 that about 60 percent of the crowd liked him "and the rest were offended," and that they became friends on the spot.
In August 1984 Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper won a San Diego battle of the bands. Brennan reports that the prize was studio time, and that their first recordings came out on a compilation of San Diego bands.
In January 1985 they opened a show in San Diego for Tex and the Horseheads, and his timeline notes that people from Enigma Records were in the room. Enigma put out their first album that year.
From there it went national. They toured opening for the Beat Farmers, the band Country Dick had formed, and "Elvis Is Everywhere" became the song his obituaries led with.
The stage Thompson came apart on that night was Symphony Hall. I wrote that night up on its own, in Hunter S. Thompson's San Diego.
The Reader's Thomas K. Arnold was the man assigned to look after Thompson. He remembers driving Thompson back to his hotel afterward "with a detour at Liticker's Liquor on Voltaire Street in Ocean Beach." There, Arnold writes, they ran into Mojo Nixon.
"Nixon was awestruck; Thompson couldn't be bothered."
That is one man's memory, written 35 years later, and nobody else recorded it.
By 1989 MTV had hired him to do announcement spots. When he married Adaire on February 11, 1989, at a go-kart track in Chula Vista, MTV filmed it. Country Dick Montana officiated.
Jerry Raney's account, from the 2024 Reader piece, is the best record of the day. The wedding party fired water balloons out of "huge slingshots." An MTV cameraman walked in front of the launch point, and the bridesmaids, in Raney's words, "creamed him right upside the head," sending the man and his camera flying. "I don't think the camera fared very well, though."
Three months later the relationship was over. In May 1989 MTV would not air the video for "Debbie Gibson Is Pregnant With My Two-Headed Love Child," which starred Winona Ryder. Nixon called it a ban and said he was done hosting for MTV. Wikipedia describes it only as the network's decision not to air the video.
This one is pure San Diego, and it is in his own words.
In a 2014 interview with the San Diego Reader, he said the city's rock stations would not put him on the air for years, because "KGB and 91X all believed that Mojo Nixon lived in a van by the river and did crystal meth and Mad Dog 20/20."
Meanwhile he had written the theme for 91X's local music show. When he died, 91X said so itself: "he even crafted the 'Loudspeaker' theme for us." He was never a 91X DJ. He wrote their music and they would not hire him.
KGB came around eventually. His own timeline has him starting afternoon drive on KGB 101.5 in October 2002. In the 2014 interview he put it at 2003, "replacing Jim McInnis," a 25 year KGB veteran. RadioInsight says he did two years in afternoons there before Sirius hired him in 2005. He said KGB "had a very tight playlist" and told him exactly what to play.
In between, he had left for Cincinnati. His timeline has the family moving there in February 1999, for radio work at WLW and then WEBN.
He kept playing San Diego rooms. One show became a record: "Mojo Nixon Live at The Casbah," recorded December 28, 2003. The Casbah opened in 1989 at 2812 Kettner Boulevard and moved to 2501 Kettner in 1994, so that one was at the current address, which is still there.
Up the coast, he was a regular at the Beat Farmers' yearly Hootenanny at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, long after Country Dick died onstage in 1995.
His last show was not in San Diego. He retired in 2004, and Wikipedia gives his last gig as March 20, 2004, at the Continental Club in Austin.
In his later San Diego years he lived in Coronado, where he did his radio show from home. Asked about living there in 2014, he put it this way: "I'm kind of behind enemy lines."
He died on February 7, 2024, aged 66, aboard the Outlaw Country Cruise while it was docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Brick by Brick, the old Spirit Club, announced on August 5, 2026, that its "chapter on Buenos Ave is coming to an end." The last show at 1130 Buenos Avenue was on Thursday, August 13. That was fifty years of live music at one address, and the room where Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper started closed two months before his induction.
The induction was set for October 16, 2026, at 7 p.m. at the Vision Center for Spiritual Healing, 4780 Mission Gorge Place. The Penetrators are in the same class, and the Beat Farmers and the Penetrators were both on the bill. Country Dick Montana drummed for one and founded the other.
A note from me, since I write these: I was in the punk scene in those years, though not here in San Diego, and I was a Mojo Nixon fan.
The Spirit's old block sits in Bay Park, between Morena Boulevard and the bay. Current numbers are in the Bay Park and Bay Ho market report, and Ocean Beach has its own.
When he came back in 1983. His own timeline says January 1983, after a bicycle trip. Brennan's encyclopedia entry says August 1983, after a job as a park ranger and a near drowning. This page uses his own dates and says so.
When he started at KGB. His timeline says October 2002. He told the Reader in 2014 it was 2003. Both are given.
Liticker's. The meeting with Thompson rests on Thomas K. Arnold's memory, written 35 years later. Nobody else recorded it.
The MTV ban. "Ban" is Nixon's word. Wikipedia and Rolling Stone describe MTV refusing to air the video and give no more than that.
Skid Roper's name. Sources disagree on his legal surname by one letter, so this page uses the name he played under.
More San Diego history: every story, oldest history first.