A free pop-up exhibit celebrating Long Beach's wildly diverse musical roots, from the Carpenters to Snoop Dogg to decades of blues, is filling a room at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach every day this month, with Friday nights reserved for live music and finger food. The Long Beach Music Museum Pop-Up runs daily from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. through October 31, and it costs nothing to walk in.
Billed as a month-long celebration dubbed Rocktober @ the Regency, the exhibit is the second pop-up staged by the Long Beach Music Museum, according to the Long Beach Post. The museum, which still has no permanent home, debuted its first pop-up in May 2026 with a sample exhibit and community reception at American Plus Bank on East Ocean Boulevard, according to Random Lengths News. This time around, the venue is the Hyatt Regency at 200 S. Pine Ave., where visitors can explore exhibits covering Long Beach music, artists and stories collected from the city's past.
Friday evenings turn the gallery into a listening room. Receptions run from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. with food, hors d'oeuvres, beverages and live performances, and this Friday's lineup features the duo Acoustic Soul Express, made up of Chad Bishop and Ashanti Dykes, playing a mix of R&B, blues and classic rock, alongside local saxophonist Daniel Mancuso, per the station's report in the Post.
A Blues Society Project Decades in the Making
The pop-up is a program of the Long Beach Blues Society, a nonprofit founded by Bill Grisolia roughly a decade before publication, after his work producing the Long Beach New Blues Festival. That festival, which Grisolia co-founded in 2014, grew to draw more than 7,000 attendees annually at Shoreline Aquatic Park before the Blues Society spun off as its own organization in 2015, according to the Long Beach Blues Society. Grisolia, a 20-year voting member of the Recording Academy who previously produced major concerts at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center for artists including Dionne Warwick, Johnny Mathis and Burt Bacharach, now serves as the Blues Society's executive director.
Long Beach's blues festival lineage actually stretches back further, to 1980, when Bernie Pearl and CSULB radio station KLON launched the original Long Beach Blues Festival, which ran annually for 30 years before going on hiatus after 2009, per the Los Angeles Times. The Blues Society's mission centers on preserving that legacy through interactive educational programs, including its Blues in the Schools initiative launched around 2018, which brings interactive music history lessons and live performances into Long Beach Unified School District campuses.
From Bank Lobbies to a Future Permanent Home
The pop-up format reflects a museum still searching for four walls of its own. Grisolia secured a $2 million grant in 2024 to acquire a building alongside Lockout Music Studios that is intended to become a future permanent facility for both the Blues Society and the Long Beach Music Museum, according to the Hollywood Times. Until that building materializes, pop-ups like the one at the Hyatt Regency give the public immediate, free access to artifacts while building momentum for the larger preservation effort.
Earlier this month, the pop-up's October programming included a special evening honoring West Coast hip-hop pioneer Kelvin Anderson and blues legend Bernie Pearl, featuring a book signing for Pearl's autobiography, Sittin' on the Right Side of the Blues, as reported by Random Lengths News. That pairing underscores just how wide a net the museum casts: Long Beach's musical history runs through the Carpenters, decades of blues and jazz, and the hip-hop empire built around Snoop Dogg.
The VIP Records Connection
Much of that hip-hop legacy traces back to World Famous VIP Records, opened in Long Beach in 1978 by Cletus Anderson and later run by Kelvin Anderson Sr. The shop's back-room studio is where Snoop Dogg, Warren G and Nate Dogg recorded their first demo tape, a session widely credited as the birthplace of G-funk, according to the Los Angeles Times. The city has since put money behind preserving that history: in January 2026, the Long Beach City Council unanimously approved spending up to $235,000 to restore the historic VIP Records sign and pay $170,000 in licensing fees to display it at a planned public park at Pacific Coast Highway and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the Long Beach Post has reported.
Visitors curious about the full scope of that history can stop by the Hyatt Regency any day through the end of October, with no admission charge and no reservation required. The Friday night receptions, running from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., remain the best chance to see the exhibits alongside a live performance, with this week's set from Acoustic Soul Express and Daniel Mancuso kicking off the evening.
