SOS Booking is a great booking group headed up by Nate (singer of Xibalba). He's been doing it for quite awhile now and is damn good at it. If you're looking for shows in Southern California, especially in and around the Inland Empire, get a hold of him/them:
SOS Booking (Facebook Page).
He's done big shows, fests, small shows, local shows, and just about anything you can think of over the last 5+ years at a ton of venues
SOS Booking takes its roots in a short lived venue from 2006-07, the SOS Project. It's something extremely important for me as I see it as one of the few tangible ways I have been able to give back in even the smallest way to something that has been so important to my life (punk/HC music).
Nathan & myself were able to put the SOS Project together through the local YMCA we both worked for (and met at) and for the most part, run it pretty freely as we liked. The flier you see is from the first show we held there. Plenty of local shows went down, and plenty of other bands made their way through in our short time- the First Step, Verse, Sinking Ships, Shook Ones, Knife Fight, My Revenge, Seven Generations, Dangers, Final Fight, Set It Straight, Life Long Tragedy, & more. The SOS Project can't be mentioned without saying how helpful Sami Begloo was in getting us bigger shows, especially early on. A defining moment for me came when Joe, who had booked and done security at Showcase Theatre called me about shows we were booking because he was trying to book shows on tours and trying to make sure that we weren't ending up booking shows on the same tours back to back (since we were in Riverside & they were in Corona)- that was a bit of a "holy shit" moment for me. Without the Showcase & Joe, there wouldn't have been any SOS.
In the end, all good things come to an end. The space we were using for the venue was a rental space for the Childcare Program I worked for. When we got a new facility for our older kids, we no longer needed the rental space. In the summer of 2007, the venue ceased. I cannot say enough of the hard work that went into it on so many people's parts, especially Nate's. I met or became better friends with so many people that I now count as some of my absolute best friends. Nate went on to book shows at Parkview in Riverside for a while, also singing in the band Out of Heart. About the same time that venue & band ran their respective courses, Andy from Time For Change/Glory Kid came into an opportunity through local legend Tina Bold, who put him in touch with Joe McNally (formerly of Voodoo Glow Skulls) who was trying to put together a music venue/community project. While that never bore fruit, Joe introduced the booking group, now comprised of Andy, Nate, and myself, to the guys at the Pharaoh's Den. By that time Nate was in Xibalba and SOS Booking was born. That's a whole other story, but SOS Booking continues on with Nate and friends hard work to bring shows to Southern California.
PS- Padded Gymnastics flooring for a show, still one of the best. Made for great wrestling match surface and some intense dodgeball games...
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