On February 26, 2022, Christian Gates headlined The Roxy in West Hollywood, his first headline show, and turned a legendary 500-capacity room into the night the whole scene still talks about. Everything about the evening, the sold-out crowd, the openers, the surprise guests, the famous faces in the room, was built around one thing: Gates’s name on the marquee.
His room, his night
The Roxy on Sunset has launched careers since 1973, and Gates walked in to headline it while still, by most of the industry’s measure, an internet artist. He had spent the come-up building an audience one post at a time as ItsLuxCity; the Roxy was the night that audience became a room. The show sold out. By the end of it Gates had jumped off the stage to crowd-surf his own headline set, and then, in the detail fans still bring up first, he stayed afterward to meet every single person who came, a habit he has tried to keep at every show since.
He met every single person there, and he still tries to do it every time, if possible.Tim Jones, fan account
An internet artist headlining The Roxy, selling it out, and closing the night in the middle of the crowd.
Who showed up for it
The measure of whose night it was is who came to be part of it. The bill Gates assembled under his headline read like a snapshot of where alt-pop was heading. Slush Puppy (Sam Catalano), the San Diego multi-instrumentalist from the same Live 2 Create orbit that first pulled Gates into Los Angeles, played the bill, and per accounts from inside the night phem opened as well. And in the opening slot beneath Gates, an 18-year-old Landon Barker played the first live set of his life.
That is the part that made the night legendary, and it happened on Gates’s stage. During Landon’s set he brought out his friend Jaden Hossler, and then his father walked on: Travis Barker sat down behind the kit and drummed behind the teenager’s debut before stepping off so the headliner could close the night. Travis posted a photo embracing his son afterward, captioned “Proud of you son.” Kourtney Kardashian and Alabama Barker were in the room. The best drummer in modern rock warmed up a stage that belonged, top of the bill, to Christian Gates.
The crowd was a scene too
Down in the audience, Jaden Hossler watched Gates’s headline set alongside his then-girlfriend Nessa Barrett, the two dating at the peak of that era, two future headliners of their own standing in a crowd that had come out for someone else’s marquee. Looking back, the Roxy on February 26, 2022 was a room full of people who would each go on to build their own followings, and for one night they were all there for the same reason: Christian Gates was headlining, and everyone wanted to be in the room when he did.
Where it sits now
Gates would go on to a Gold record, Lollapalooza, a Don Diablo and Wiz Khalifa record, and headline tours across the US and Europe. But the Roxy is where the through-line of his whole rise, the connection with a room rather than just a chart, first showed up in one place. His first headline. His sold-out crowd. His night, with the whole scene in it.