A Little Bit About Pappy & Harriet’s

In 1946 a character actor named Dick Curtis — six foot three, a professional heavy in more than 230 westerns — talked a group of Hollywood people into funding a permanent movie set out past Yucca Valley. Not a backlot. A real town where crews could sleep, eat, bowl, and shoot. The investors were the names you’d recognize: Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, the two biggest singing cowboys of the era; Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello; Rogers’ harmony group, the Sons of the Pioneers, who gave the place its name. Ground broke that year. Mane Street got a saloon, a bank, a chapel, a jail, and a cantina. More than fifty movies and TV shows shot there through the ’40s and ’50s, including The Cisco Kid and Judge Roy Bean.

The cantina facade is the building Pappy’s lives in now. There’s some disagreement in the record about the middle years — one account has it running as a Signal gas station before the pumps came out — but everybody agrees on 1972. That’s when Francis Aleba bought it and opened The Cantina, a biker bar that sold cold beer and burritos and not much else. It ran hard for ten years and closed, and Aleba kept it in the family.

In 1982, her daughter Harriet and Harriet’s husband, Claude Allen — Pappy to everyone — reopened the place as Pappy & Harriet’s Pioneertown Palace. The bikers stayed. Families showed up, too. Harriet cooked and sang country standards, Pappy kept the building standing and got on stage himself, and their granddaughter Kristina sang with them.

Pappy died in 1994. Hundreds of people flew in for the memorial. Victoria Williams, the singer-songwriter who’d toured with him and counted him a friend, wrote “Happy to Have Known Pappy” about that day and put it on her record Loose. Harriet sold to a family friend, a local pilot named Jay Hauk, who held it a few years. The place drifted.

Then in 2003, two New Yorkers, Robyn Celia and Linda Krantz, bought it because they loved it and couldn’t stand watching Pappy’s fade. They ran it for eighteen years, and they’re the reason the outside world knows the name. Celia booked most of the shows herself. Goldenvoice, the Coachella promoter, and the Santa Monica public station KCRW started staging nights there. Anthony Bourdain shot an episode there. Billboard called it one of the ten best hidden-gem clubs in the country in 2012.

The list of who’s played Pappy’s is ridiculous: Robert Plant, Leon Russell, Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age, Neko Case, Lucinda Williams, Vampire Weekend, Patti Smith, Lana Del Rey. In 2016, Paul McCartney played — announced that morning, tickets sold at the box office starting at 6:30 p.m., fifty bucks, cash only, one per person, 244 people inside. Emma Stone and David Hockney were in the crowd. Cars lined Pioneertown Road for a mile. Six months later, Lorde announced a show six hours ahead of time and sold it out in under a minute at twenty dollars a ticket.

Celia and Krantz sold in April 2021, for about $2.5 million, to a partnership: Morgan Margolis, CEO of Knitting Factory Entertainment, with investors on one side and an L.A. couple, JB Moresco and Lisa Elin, on the other. It fell apart almost immediately. By June, Moresco and Elin had changed the locks and shut Margolis out. Margolis sued. In December 18, 2024, a jury found unanimously for the Margolis group, awarded damages for breach of contract and taking of intellectual property, and stripped Moresco and Elin of their general-partner role. Knitting Factory took over operations five days later. One small tell of that whole period: from 2021 to 2024 the business styled itself Pappy + Harriet’s, with a plus sign. It’s back to the ampersand.