Home run! Steve Poltz is back in San Diego just in time to accept a major award
How does Steve Poltz feel about being the San Diego Music Awards’ 2026 Country Dick Montana Lifetime Achievement Award recipient?
It’s complicated for this much beloved singer-songwriter, ebullient entertainer and charismatic raconteur. He has 17 solo albums to his credit of alternately zany and tender songs and has memorably performed with everyone from Jewel, Mojo Nixon, Lisa Sanders, A.J. Croce and the late Montana to Rickie Lee Jones, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and Squeeze co-founder Glenn Tilbrook.
So complicated, in fact, that Poltz offered multiple responses about being this year’s lifetime honoree at the 35-year-old awards fete, which takes place May 6 at Humphreys Concerts by the Bay.
Since its inception in 1991, the nonprofit event has raised $915,799 to fund Guitars for Schools, a program that has provided instruments made by El Cajon-based Taylor Guitars to 131 schools across San Diego County.
The prestigious award Poltz will receive is named after the late Country Dick Montana, who was the magnetic front man in the uproarious San Diego band Beat Farmers. Montana (real name: Dan McLain) remains a larger-than-life figure today, 31 years after his onstage death during a 1995 Beat Farmers’ performance in Whistler, Canada.
“I don’t like awards, but to get one with Dick’s name on it - his imprimatur - is very special to me,” said Poltz, who recently moved back to San Diego with his wife, Sharon, after nearly a decade in Nashville.
“It’s pretty exciting,” said Poltz’s wife, Sharon, who is the former bassist in the San Diego band C.L.A. “It’s a really big honor for Steve, especially since the award is in Country Dick’s name.”
Poltz’s award will be presented to him by his longtime musical pal, former San Diego Padres second baseman and third base coach Tim Flannery.
“It’s fantastic that Steve is getting this award,” said Flannery, who has made 14 albums of his own and toured as Poltz’s opening act.
“I’ve yet to meet anybody in the music industry who can do what Steve does. And there will be many more awards to come, just because of his passion, work ethic and his love for ‘watering his flowers,’ as he likes to call his fans. Every award he gets, he deserves.”
Poltz isn’t so sure about that.
Mixed feelings
The veteran troubadour elaborated on his ambivalence about his upcoming lifetime honor during two in-depth San Diego Union-Tribune interviews. The most recent took place April 14, the same day he flew out for a 17-concert tour of Canada, where Poltz was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The first interview was Feb. 23, the day before he left town for his annual six-week concert and festival tour of Australia and New Zealand.
Poltz also chatted during an April 13 photo shoot for this article at Petco Park, where he and Flannery spontaneously broke into several songs, including Grateful Dead’s “Friend of The Devil” and John Prine’s “Ain’t Hurtin’ Nobody.”
Being on the field at Petco Park was a homecoming for Flannery, who played 11 seasons with the San Diego Padres between 1979 and 1989. It was also a homecoming for Poltz, a lifelong baseball fanatic.
He has sung the national anthem several times at the downtown stadium, on his own and with former Rugburns’ band member Gregory Page. He has also written and recorded songs about Flannery (“Fixin’ Up,” which appears on Poltz’s enchanting new album, “JoyRide”) and the late Padres legend Tony Gwynn (“Hey Hey #19”). which Poltz happily sang, twice, during the photo shoot. “Hey Hey” was featured in the 2018 Major League Baseball film documentary, “Mr. Padre.”
Poltz’s varied responses about his impending award reflect his candor and dedication to his craft. They also reflect his sly sense of humor and his continuing admiration for Montana, one of several standout San Diego musicians he credits as a key mentor and inspiration.
Response No. 1: “I think I’m too young for it. I just turned 66. I haven’t lived life yet.”
Response No. 2: “I don’t really like awards. I think they’re dumb! I mean it’s nice, I guess. But I didn’t get into this for awards. It’s about music. This (award) is a good thing because it puts guitars in the schools and that’s a good cause. But you can’t really reward someone for being an artist. What does that even mean? It’s all so silly. You won the ‘Best Album Award’ because a group of people said you did? Don’t let it go to your head, kid. The audience will let you know if it’s good or if it’s bulls–t. I know we want to put labels on things, but art is just art, and it’s whatever you feel.”
Response No. 3: “I’ve been really lucky because I’ve eked out a career and play at all these places around the world - and every time I play, the crowds get a little bigger. So, it’s been very rewarding to do this and that’s why I’m thrilled to get this lifetime achievement award. There! I’ve talked myself into it!”
Response No. 4: “The reason I don’t like awards is probably imposter syndrome. I got an award once for being an ‘Influential Artist of the Decade’ and it was kind of embarrassing. You get reactions like: ‘I hate you because you won something.’ I just want to fly under the radar. You know what the reward is? It’s playing shows and people showing up. That makes me happy and I love it more today than when I started.”
Response No. 5: “I’m not young enough to sound ungrateful, because it is nice and this is a good thing. And also because this award has Country Dick Montana’s name on it. He was such a fascinating character and I have so many fond memories of him coming to see my band, The Rugburns, late at night at Kelly’s Pub in Old Town. He was almost like a coach and when he came in it was really special. It gave me sort of a heightened awareness that there was this guy, here in San Diego, who was a near-legendary character - almost like someone out of a novel - who was larger than life. He’d come in and people would whisper: ‘Country Dick is here!’ He built this whole persona with his voice and with the way he could control a crowd when he was on stage.”
Rugburns to Jewel and beyond
Poltz has built quite a persona of his own, first with his freewheeling band, The Rugburns, then as a solo artist who has averaged more than 250 shows a year since his debut album, “One Left Shoe,” was released in 1998.
That was one year after the song “You Were Meant For Me” - which Poltz co-wrote with his then-girlfriend, Jewel - rose almost to the top of the national Billboard sales chart. It remained there for a then-record 65 weeks and was pivotal in helping Jewel’s debut album, “Pieces of You,” sell more than 12 million copies in the U.S. alone.
“I knew from the time we were little kids that Steve would be successful,” said his older sister and fellow San Diego resident Kathy Swiggs, a retired medical assistant.
“He really deserves this lifetime achievement award and I’m so proud of him. I can see why he would say he has imposter syndrome. But he is so original and he puts himself on the line each time he performs. His music is a gift he likes to share with everybody. Steve is humble and brave and quirky. He’s definitely not an imposter at all.”
A classically-trained guitarist, Poltz was 18 when he followed in his sister’s footsteps and joined Up With People, a squeaky-clean singing group that performed such songs as “You Can’t Live Crooked (And Think Straight),” “Rock ‘N' Roll Is Gone For Good,” “Gee, I'm Looking Forward To The Future” and “The Ballad of Joan of Arc."
Up With People was later lampooned on two episodes of “The Simpsons” TV show and in Poltz’s satirical 2022 song, “Up With People.” It includes the couplet: “My sister taught me how to smoke weed before she joined Up With People / She left me all her rolling papers, so I joined Up With People too.”
With or without weed, the year Poltz spent playing guitar in Up With People’s Latin American division proved to be an eye-opening experience in several ways.
“Totally!” he said. “It really whetted my appetite to travel and play shows - and for staying with people on tour, which I did a lot of during my time in The Rugburns when we were sleeping on people’s floors. I also learned about getting to shows early for the (equipment) load-ins and doing soundchecks, and also about doing PR to advance a show and sell it.”
Poltz laughed.
“Before I joined in 1978, I didn’t know how dorky and goodie-two-shoes Up With People was,” he said. “It was at the time when the bands Blondie, Talking Heads and Television were all coming up from the underground in New York City, and I couldn’t have been further away. I didn’t even know that world existed! So, when I got into Up With People I was so proud. And everybody at Palm Springs High School was like: ‘Whoa! Steve Poltz got into Up With People’!”
He laughed again.
“I was in the band and a lot of band members were what you would expect - misfits who were smoking weed, which you could get sent home for. I was into ‘Saturday Night Fever’ and I loved musicals. I thought all that stuff was cool; I didn’t realize how uncool it was. It makes me laugh so hard now.”
Political science major
Laughter was a key ingredient for Poltz and his fellow Rugburns, whose performances were equally notable for the memorable music and the unforgettable on-stage mayhem that were the band’s dual calling cards.
Poltz co-founded The Rugburns in 1982 with fellow guitarists Robert Driscoll and Gerald McMullin. At the time, all three were students at the University of San Diego, where Poltz majored in political science and minored in Spanish. ("When I got my degree, I knew I wouldn't have a job, but at least I'd know why,” he recalled in a 2010 Union-Tribune interview.)
McMullin did not stay very long in the group, which then - as a mostly acoustic duo - honed its songwriting and stagecraft chops sufficiently to build a loyal and increasingly larger San Diego following.
After adding bassist Gregory Page and drummer Jeff “Stinky” Aafedt, The Rugburns signed its first record deal and released two full-length albums. The first, 1994’s “Morning Wood,” was produced by the late Buddy Blue, who was a Beat Farmers band alum and a Union-Tribune Night & Day columnist. The album included an improbably upbeat song about cannibalism, “Hitchhiker Joe,” that was in constant rotation for months on several San Diego radio stations. The video for the song featured such local luminaries as Jose Sinatra, Mighty Joe Longa and a then barely known Jewel, who was just 19 at the time.
“It’s definitely out of the norm that a local band is doing this well,” 91X FM’s Vice President of Programming, Kevin Stapleford, told the Union-Tribune at the time. “The requests for (The Rugburns’ songs) are as significant as for Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.”
During some rare time off from the Rugburns in 1994, Poltz traveled with Jewel to cut five songs for her debut album at Neil Young’s rural recording studio in Northern California. A year later, The Rugburns’ second and final album, the hip-hop-free “Taking The World By Donkey,” was released on Priority Records, a Los Angeles label whose roster at the time also included gangsta rap stars Ice-T and Ice Cube.
Best Dixieland?
In a 1995 U-T interview, Poltz quipped: “In the past two years The Rugburns won the Best Folk, Best Rock and Best Alternative categories in the San Diego Music Awards. Maybe next year we’ll win Best Dixieland, or Best Rap, since we’re now on Priority.”
The band’s reputation for wild performances was deservedly formidable. Ditto the number of instances when Poltz suffered self-inflicted injuries on stage.
At a May 1994 San Diego gig at the Casbah, he crowd-surfed while clad a white prom gown. When a fan grabbed him “where the sun don’t shine,” the shocked singer fell on his head. Dazed, Poltz ran into a mirror, cutting his head open above his right eye and concussing himself.
“I went to a doctor who told me to lay low, but that’s hard to do. We had too many shows scheduled,” Poltz recalled in a subsequent U-T interview. “So, I tried going more in the direction of Kenny G, playing the sax, and I felt better about myself.”
Two months later, at a July 1994 Rugburns’ gig at Molly Malone’s in Los Angeles, Poltz dashed off stage to don the same white gown he’d worn at the Casbah. As he gleefully bounded back on stage, he ran into a wooden beam. Rushed to a hospital, he was treated for another concussion and bruised ribs. He received 48 stitches near his blood-soaked hairline.
“What I’ve learned from all this,” Poltz mused at the time, “is that the white gown is cursed. I may wear it again, but only with a hard hat.”
COVID and a stroke
Poltz’s tenacity was put to the test most recently in early 2022 when he came down with COVID after performing a series of unmasked indoor shows in Florida. Two years earlier, he had written and recorded the irreverent song “Quarantine Blues,” in which he gamely rhymed “coronavirus" with "Miley Cyrus," "vaccine" with "hydroxychloroquine," and "Fauci" with "grouchy."
“I had fever and aches and pains, and my throat was swollen almost entirely shut for six days. I gave COVID to my wife, Sharon,” Poltz told the U-T in 2022.
“Little did I know at the time that I was suddenly ‘Typhoid Mary.' I had been so careful up until then. I guess I got a little cocky because I was vaxxed and boosted, even though I read the news and knew the Omicron variant was spreading in a wave. Sharon said to me: ‘If we go to Florida, we'll get COVID,' and she was right."
But Poltz faced a far bigger challenge October 2016, when he suffered a stroke while performing a show in Delaware at the World Cafe in Wilmington. He temporarily lost his vision, mid-song, suffered such a severe vertigo attack and repeated the second verse of his song “Single Life," five times in a row, without realizing it.
Poltz was hospitalized at Princeton Medical Center in New Jersey for four days. He ran up a medical bill of $60,000 before flying back to San Diego. It would be nearly eight months before he performed again.
"Before I left Princeton, they said I had to cancel all my shows and get a cardiologist and neurologist here (in San Diego) right away,” Poltz told the U-T after his 2016 stroke. “Fortunately, I had just renewed my Blue Shield coverage a few days earlier, after it had lapsed while I was on the road."
Steve Poltz on life, music & having a stroke
After his stroke, Sharon sold her hair salon in Little Italy so that she could devote her time to helping him make a full recovery.
“I go out on the road now with Steve about 50 percent of the time,” she said. “I book all his flights, hotels and rental cars, so it’s like I’m his tour manager from afar.”
Poltz’s one-man concerts are joyous affairs that celebrate music’s power to uplift, entertain and unify. His impromptu, between-songs monologues can be as engaging as the music he performs.
Poltz’s songs are often irreverent, as demonstrated by “Brand New Liver,” “Fistfight at a Vegan Brunch,” “(Why You Going Out With That) Gold’s Gym Guy?” and “Give You Up For Lent.” He can also be thoughtful and introspective, as he is on “I Want All My Friends To Be Happy,” “Stardust and Satellites,” “Rains,” “Brief History of My Life,” “Lost Without You” and “California.”
In 1999, Poltz’s unabashed ode to love, “Everything About You,” was featured alongside songs by Al Green, Elvis Costello, Shania Twain, Bill Withers and other artists on the soundtrack to the hit Julia Roberts/Hugh Grant film, “Notting Hill.” That was the same year Poltz performed in New York as a member of Jewel’s band at the violence-marred 1999 Woodstock festival, which ended with a fiery riot.
"We went on right after Elvis Costello and right before Red Hot Chili Peppers," Poltz told the U-T in 2022. "Then, all the Porta Potties at Woodstock were set on fire. So, we jumped back on our tour bus, which we'd rented from Foghat, and got the hell out of there."
A new lease on life
Poltz has been happily sober for the past 22 years.
He began to hit rock bottom after the 1999 murder of fellow San Diego musician Steve Foth, who was a close friend. The two had spent hours writing songs together on the beach in Bird Rock, during what turned out to be Foth’s last day alive. Later that day, he was stabbed to death in a drug deal gone bad by two transients and a prostitute. Poltz, like many in the local music community, was devastated.
“Steve and I used to party together real hard and I was heartbroken by his murder,” Poltz said. “I kept spiraling down. I’d say: ‘I don’t want to do coke anymore.’ I knew if I didn’t drink, I would do coke …
“Then, I thought I was having a heart attack and was rushed to Mission Bay Hospital, where they slowed my heart down. I still partied after that; the impact of Steve’s death really hit me hard. The turning point came later when I had just landed here at the airport. They say that when you’re ready, you’re ready. I called (an AA sponsor) and he picked up the phone. I was ready.”
By Poltz’s own acknowledgement, the odds of survival were not in his favor.
“When I went into rehab,” he said, “the therapist told me: ‘You’ll probably be dead within two weeks; I’ve seen this before.’ I was messed up, and I really think I’d be dead if I hadn’t gotten sober,” he said.
Did creating and performing music take on a new or different meaning for Poltz after he became sober?
“Yeah,” came his matter-of-fact reply. “Because I’d built my brand around being a drunk. It was part of my image. I sold T-shirts that said ‘I Drink Like Poltz.’ My whole thing was to be the Dean Martin of folk singers, even though Dean didn’t drink that much.
“So, when I stopped, I remember wondering: ‘What am I going to do?’ I soon came to realize: ‘Oh, man, music is even better when you’re sober.’ You can feel a song whether it makes you smile, cry or gives you energy. If it does something, then it’s done its job. I love music more today than the first time I played at the San Diego Music Awards, 35 years ago with The Rugburns, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla.
“We played ‘Honky Tonk Blues’ by Hank Williams and ‘Nuclear Noodles,’ a song I never play anymore about the world blowing up. You called us ‘erstwhile folkies’ in your review, and ‘erstwhile; is a good word. I was thrilled we got to play at that awards show. It brought awareness that we were being recognized and it’s been long slog.”
Poltz paused for emphasis.
“I know what it’s like to be around people who are really big, like at the height of Jewel’s fame, or Jason Mraz’s fame when he sold out the Hollywood Bowl. I don’t have a need for that level of popularity. But on this last tour I did, I was selling out all the venues.
“Each year, it gets a little better. I get paid to do something I would do for free, and to travel the world. So, I don’t know if retirement will ever happen for me, even though I am now on Medicare. I just turned 66 and made a promise to myself to do fewer shows after I turn 70, so - for the next four years - I’m going to keep my nose to the grindstone.”
The 35th Annual San Diego Music Awards
Featuring performances by: Steve Poltz, The Freights, Obed Padilla, Agent 51, the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory Ensemble, Whitney Shay, Robin Henkel, Earl Thomas and Anthony Cullins
When: 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 6
Where: Humphreys Concerts by the Bay, 2241 Shelter Island Drive, Shelter Island
Tickets: $45.89 (general admission), $133 (VIP reserved)
Online: sandiegomusicawards.com
Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.
This story was originally published April 26, 2026 at 6:15 AM.