Montecito, California, a community with a glittering coastline and pristine weather, is often viewed as a place where people of a certain income bracket buy a sprawling estate. Although the Central Coast town is known as a well-manicured playground of talk show figures like Oprah and Ellen, or royals Meghan and Harry, it used to be edgier.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a ragtag group of surfer, skater and biker punk kids called the Cito Rats held court throughout Montecito. They commanded surf breaks, biked around town, cobbled together halfpipes in backyards and partied until dawn at punk shows in crumbling mansions. In those days, a nascent concert promoter upstart named Goldenvoice began hosting gigs at Santa Barbara’s Casa de La Raza. They booked bands central to the Cito Rats scene, like RKL (which stood for Rich Kids on LSD), with some members, like frontman Jason Sears, who were part of the crew.
The hardscrabble group “was almost like a version of [Jeff] Spicoli, the hardcore punk version of that,” says Robbie Robinson, a photographer and area resident who cut his teeth shooting punk shows at the time, referring to Sean Penn’s stoner character “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
This being Montecito, the Cito Rats counted a now-celebrity in their ranks: The actor Josh Brolin, who grew up on the Central Coast and considered those in the “misfit collective” as his “brothers,” as he described in his book “From Under the Truck: A Decidedly Un-Celebrity Memoir from the Enigmatic Actor.”
While lesser-known than famed skater-surf collectives like Venice Beach’s Lords of Dogtown, the Cito Rats held a similarly outsized reputation as a territorial surf gang — not unlike Palos Verdes’ Lunada Bay Boys and Hawaii’s Black Shorts, who wouldn’t hesitate to lash out at anyone who dared encroach on their turf. But Michael Herbert, a Cito Rat whose home became the crew’s de facto clubhouse, says that characterization isn’t accurate although some localism did happen. “Somehow in the old folklore of Montecito, we developed into being called a violent surf gang,” he says. Rather, “every one of us were surfers by default.”
Occasionally, people would get into tiffs, “but for the most part everybody was happy-go-lucky, positive,” says Mark Jimenez, a fellow Cito Rat. “How could you not be positive on one of the greatest pieces of geological real estate on Earth? Perfect weather, perfect beaches and, back then, before it got overcrowded, you could afford to be there and have a good time.”
A place of ‘moldy elegance’
When the Cito Rats sprang up in the 1970s, Montecito was a quiet town dotted with various rambling, dilapidated mansions that early 20th century socialites ceased maintaining. Decades later, these homes had an unkempt feeling to them, all entangled vines and chipped paint — places of “moldy elegance,” as Herbert describes…