Where It All Started, Matchbox Twenty Opens Its 30th Year at the Fonda

Matchbox Twenty will open their 30th anniversary year with a one-night-only show at the Fonda Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard on Monday, October 12. Rob Thomas and Paul Doucette told Rolling Stone that the band will play its debut album, Yourself or Someone Like You, in its entirety. The show starts at 8 p.m.

“We’re going back to where it all started. 30 years ago we were an uncertain band with an uncertain future and a handful of songs we rehearsed in a rented storage unit. Those songs became ‘Yourself or Someone Like You’,” the band posted on October 2.

The album came out in 1996 with “3 AM,” “Push,” “Real World,” “Back 2 Good” and “Long Day,” and it is now certified diamond at 12 times platinum. Its title has a Los Angeles root. Thomas and Doucette heard a performer at Café Largo dedicate a song to “you, or someone like you,” and they renamed the record, originally called Woodshed Diaries, before it was released.

It will be the band’s first gig at the Fonda, and the night is part of the theatre’s own centennial. The Fonda opened in 1926 as Carter De Haven’s Music Box and later, as the Pix Theatre, premiered Jaws and Rocky, according to the venue’s anniversary page. Its October series also includes Father John Misty and Remi Wolf. Doucette, who moved from drums to guitar after Adam Gaynor left in 2004, will play guitar on “Busted” for the first time.

“There’s a nostalgia there, especially because we’re focusing on the first record,” Doucette told Rolling Stone. “And nostalgia for that time we were discovering L.A. for the first time.”

Selected fans who registered by October 4 will receive invitations starting October 7, with ticket sales on October 8 and 9. A 2027 tour spanning the band’s whole catalog is planned, and the band will play Stagecoach in April. For more live music in Hollywood, read Where They Cut Their Teeth, Social Distortion Brings Born to Kill to the Hollywood Palladium.