This early winter, catch one or all of these headliners; and know that through the coldest months, the Crystal Bay Club will host one to two shows a week that’ll warm you up. For a comprehensive lineup, showtimes, and tickets, visit crystalbaycasino.com.
The days are short and the nights are cold. It’s a good thing that North Tahoe’s premier indoor music venue’s lineup is as hot as a ski-wax iron. Here are four headliners not to miss.
Andy Frasco & the UN
If you’ve ever been to an Andy Frasco show, you know the fun-filled fiasco-fest that awaits: Andy up on stage behind his piano banging away at the keys like Billy Joel on a bender — his multi-instrument, multi-personality band and he composing a chaos-theory jam fest of jubilant joy and boyish jocularity that would make Janis Joplin smile.
The tunes play on. The Jameson bottle perched on the piano passes from performer to performer as your troubles melt into the past and the party really gets going: Andy Frasco & the UN hit the Crown Room stage at the Crystal Bay Club Casino Feb. 3, making your Tuesday rock like Elton on a Saturday night.
The show will be the band’s 28th amid its 38-show nationwide Growing Pains tour. But the baby fat on this bellicose band, now with 10 studio albums and hundreds of primetime sets slayed at concerts and festivals worldwide, has long since given way to a certain man-strength momentum. And though under one of his vintage Los Angeles Lakers basketball jerseys, Andy’s dadbod and shaggy curls may not inspire the image of Adonis, Frasco’s musical energy is high on sex appeal.
With its latest album (also entitled Growing Pains), the UN builds on such sonic successes as its debut, “Love, You’re Just Too Expensive,” 2016’s “Happy Bastard,” and 2022’s “Wash, Rinse, Repeat.” Their sound blends genres and breaks rules. It’s loud. It’s full of movement. It says, “fuck you” and then invites you in like a warm neighbor. It is piano-led blues meets rockabilly with some rasta reggae and a side of soul. It’s a trumpet dueling a sax. It’s Nashville songwriting and a “Smells Like Teen Spirit” cover. It’s rad and it’s good, it’s rock ’n’ roll like it should.
At a 2024 show in Phoenix, Frasco grabbed the mic and rapped about life before starting the set’s final song, his thoughts turning to his mom who’d recently survived leukemia. “It’s like, death is a real thing,” he said. “And it makes you think, what are we going to do with our life? You know, are we going to marinate in shit or get out there and fucking live it every single day?”
On February 3, 2026, with Andy Frasco & the UN in town, there’s the perfect opportunity to get out there and live it.
Dead Winter Carpenters
If our mountain-town air and pow-turn Zen and lazy lake days had a house band, it just might be the Dead Winter Carpenters. The Truckee/Tahoe locals lead with the fiddle and fight the good fight with all their strings and percussion and core-cutting lyrics. They find musical victory with their mix of Americana-roots rock and forward-thinking bluegrass with a little altitude-twang thrown in. They’ve played the Filmore and High Sierra and a ton of other notable locales, including a late-night Sergeant Pepper’s Set (complete with costume and gravitas) at the since-gone Hangtown Music Festival down in Placerville that lifted the roof right off the barn. If you’ve seen what the Carpenters can do on a Sunday afternoon at Commons Beach, this Jan. 24 is the time to see what they can do when the sun’s gone down and the kids have been put to bed.
The Polish Ambassador
Having been at the forefront of the EDM/live music fusion-scene for nearly two decades, this international man of funky mystery is bringing his turntables and jumpsuits to North Tahoe this Jan. 16 and 17 for two nights of partying with purpose. He’ll bring the mojo. He’ll lay the beats. He’ll rap. He’ll rock. He’ll bring goddesses on stage with ethereal and ancient voices and vibe in Venn diagrams of sonic soliloquies. He’ll stir the dancefloor as he unleashes his rhythms. He’ll show you that you can be a rockstar even (or especially) if you live off-grid on a 25-acre homestead in the Sierra foothills as a farmer and carpenter who records in a solar-powered studio surrounded by towering trees and fresh air. These ambassadorial nights look to be filled with freedom and connection, with light feet and easy smiles.
Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe
Karl Denson has come a long way since playing sax in the band Sexual Chocolate in Eddie Murphy’s forever-classic Coming to America. In fact, he’s created his own universe — which he brings to town Dec. 26 — and it’s not even that tiny.
Denson infuses audiences with electricity and soul, his audacious and eclectic ensemble band both backing him up and taking the lead as cosmic forces of musical theory big-bang their way into something very real and tangible and profound. Even though I’m not really supposed to say “I” in these articles, I saw him last spring at the Golden Road Gathering, and I don’t think he’s ever been better. Fine wine gets better with age — and since being the first-ever Bonnaroo late-night act, Karl D’s universe just keeps expanding into interstellar territories that light us up and leave us groovin’.
