Can Ocean Way a car-free Coachella by the sea revive Santa Monica's nightlife?

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Set us as preferred A multiday music festival on the beach is a SoCal dream that has tantalized and vexed concert promoters for generations.Santa Monica, home to one of the most famous stretches of sand on the planet and plenty of music history, would seem a natural fit.

Why has no one been able to pull it off here?“The biggest reason is it wasn’t an option,” said Nic Adler, the concert producer with Goldenvoice behind this fall’s new Ocean Way Festival on the sand in Santa Monica.“It wasn’t something that Santa Monica understood or wanted until recently.”The only guide you need for fall entertainment.A confluence of the recent World Cup and the upcoming Olympics, a hard-hit Third Street Promenade retail corridor, and increased civic openness to live events in Santa Monica public spaces finally created an opening.

Goldenvoice’s new flagship Westside festival, with the Killers and Olivia Dean playing Sept.26-27, is a bold and potentially groundbreaking concert that will reintroduce the pricey beachside city to music fans used to going east.“I think Santa Monica finally understood what they had in their backyard and was like, ‘We need to do something here,’” Adler said.

“You step out of the car in Santa Monica and step on the beach.You will get the same feeling every single time, and it’s ‘Wow, I can’t believe that I’m here.’ They have one of the greatest untouched spots there is.”Aside from the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, many of Goldenvoice’s smaller festivals — like the millennial-hipster Just Like Heaven or Chappell Roan’s recent Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things — are based in Brookside at the Rose Bowl, a verdant park and golf course in Pasadena.

It’s close to where Goldenvoice’s prime concert-going audience lives around Los Angeles,...