CLUB OWNER REMAINS OPTIMISTIC DESPITE FIRE

If Jerry Roach has learned one thing in his 15 years running nightclubs in Orange County, it’s how to remain philosophical in the face of disaster, a quality that was put to the test last week when an arson fire destroyed Radio City in Anaheim.

“I’ll bounce back,” Roach said this week. “I always have.” He estimates that it will take two to three months to rebuild the rock club that he has owned since 1978. The club burned down once before in 1980, when it was still called Casablanca.

As one of the few original music showcase clubs in Orange County, Radio City was the only outlet in the county for many heavy metal and hard rock bands. Yet there’s been no outpouring of support from the local music community in the wake of the Nov. 3 fire, perhaps a reflection of the love-hate relationship Roach has with local musicians and their fans.

“I’ve gotten calls from a number of well-wishers, but I haven’t heard anything about any benefit concerts,” Roach said.

The fire, which Roach estimates caused more than $100,000 in damage, came just as he is marking the 15-year anniversary since he opened his first club, the Bacchus House in Newport Beach.

Over the years, Roach has remained one of the most colorful, outspoken and frequently controversial figures in Orange County pop music, a reputation built largely during his tenure as owner of the Cuckoo’s Nest in Costa Mesa. That club frequently generated sparks with city officials when it became the headquarters for punk rock in Orange County in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

“When anyone asks how I got into the nightclub business, I say ‘carelessness,’ ” Roach said with a laugh, “because it certainly hasn’t made me rich.”

Perhaps not, but he appeared comfortable on at least one recent afternoon as he sat upstairs in the three-story Laguna Beach home that he describes as “the house the Cuckoo’s Nest built.” His dark hair flecked in recent years with strands of gray, Roach, 42, said that what he has enjoyed most about the club business is spotting musical trends.

“New trends obviously start on the club level. It’s fun to see a band take off. That’s the thing that’s interesting to me: watching the trends emerge and going with the trend until it peters out and waiting for the next one,” he said.

Roach’s clubs have, in fact, been at the center of several musical trends: from punk at the Cuckoo’s Nest to the 1982-83 rockabilly revival at Radio City to the resurgence of heavy metal at Radio City in recent months.

But while he has been observing the musical trends, Roach has also been something of a trend-setter as a businessman, though some would argue that it has not always been in the positive sense of the term.

He was among the first to encourage local bands to print their own tickets, entitling fans to a discount and simultaneously providing the club owner with a way of gauging the popularity of each group. The idea of discount tickets has become standard in most original music clubs, as well as a frequent bone of contention among musicians who complain that they come out on the short end of post-concert ticket tallies.

In 1984, Roach sparked a controversy when he charged groups a $40 booking deposit, to be forfeited if the act failed to appear or drew less than 10 people. Musicians blasted the idea as a “pay-to-play” policy, but Roach insisted it was a legitimate way of stemming losses on groups that failed to adequately promote their shows.

Entering the realm of visual media in 1983, Roach produced a short documentary on the Cuckoo’s Nest, “Urban Struggle,” and also is planning a film on San Fermin, the running of the bulls festival he attends annually in Pamplona, Spain.

More recently, he started bringing the video revolution spawned by MTV down to the club level by using a video camera to project images of each band’s performance to large video screen at Radio City. Musicians who want a video record of their performance can buy their tape for $50. If an act isn’t interested, Roach said he simply reuses the tape on another group.

Although such creative business techniques have enabled him to showcase local original music and survive while countless others have folded, Roach still makes mistakes.

Earlier this year he bought the French Quarter, a Top-40 club next to Radio City. He tried to offer a different type of entertainment each night at the French Quarter, but the experiment failed and Roach sold the club at a loss of about $8,000.

Also high on his “If I Only Had It to Do Over Again” list is the time he turned down a chance to book Van Halen--for $500.

“That’s probably my biggest mistake,” he said with a chuckle. “That was just before they really took off and before they had signed with Warner Bros. Their manager was lecturing me about how they were the hottest band in Los Angeles, so I just hung up on him.”

Surprisingly, perhaps, Roach’s fondest memories are not of the Cuckoo’s Nest and all the headlines it generated, but rather of the Bacchus House, where he booked his first big-name show in 1970 with 1950s rocker Bo Diddley. Among the other blues performers who appeared at that club were Albert Collins, Jimmy Reed, Charlie Musselwhite and Harvey Mandel.

“The Bacchus House was when we did it for fun, not money,” Roach said, “because we never made a penny. It was sort of like one of those ‘Our Gang’ comedies, where one guy says: ‘My mom’s got a bed sheet, we can use that as a curtain.’ I’ll never forget trying to find a band the first time because we had no idea what to do. That’s how we learned the business; it was like on-the-job training.”

Such training, he said, was even more instructive than the financial theories he studied at Cal State Long Beach as an economics major.

“It’s real tough to start a business without any capital at all--I mean zero--but I think that’s the way you have to do it in the club business. You have to learn to be tight-fisted with money or you just won’t make it,” he said. “If I’d had $50,000, I could have spent it all in two or three weeks getting the place open. As it was, we didn’t have anything, but we accomplished the same ends.”

In 1976, Roach and a partner bought Finnegan’s Rainbow in Costa Mesa, which in the late ‘60s had been the Orange County headquarters for psychedelic music before going dormant. After starting out booking Top-40 bands, Roach experimented with various types of music at the club, which he renamed the Cuckoo’s Nest, until he stumbled upon punk rock in 1978.

For the next three years, the Cuckoo’s Nest became the punk mecca of Orange County. But contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t strictly punk. On nights when he didn’t have such punk acts as the Ramones, Iggy Pop, David Johanson, the Damned or top L.A. bands such as Fear, the Circle Jerks and Black Flag, Roach booked rock and pop acts ranging from the Go-Go’s to the Knack to the Blasters.

One of Roach’s favorite Cuckoo’s Nest stories involves the Blasters, which played for the first time at his club and was paid $50. “Later, I figured out that I overpaid them $15 or $16 so I called them up and asked them for the money back,” he said, chuckling. “I only did it because I knew that if I had underpaid them they would have called me asking for it.”

After those embattled years, which ended in December, 1981, when he closed the Cuckoo’s Nest permanently, Roach adopted a new credo of “Don’t get too big.” At Radio City, where day-to-day operations had been assumed in recent months by manager Mars Black, that has meant booking mostly local, unknown bands.

“I try hard not to break the rules because obviously I know what they (local officials) can do if they want. I’m very aware of their powers,” he said. Another reason he avoids booking better-known groups now is that “every time you book a name act, you’re gambling. They want a guarantee and you never know whether they’ll draw. Local bands get out and work to promote their shows and the big acts don’t.

“We have an open-door policy, which means that anyone can get a gig at Radio City,” he said. “I think we’re providing an important service by giving new bands a place to play.”

A rarely seen facet of the maverick of Orange County pop music is Jerry Roach the family man, who lives with his wife, Joan, and three sons in the hillside house above Laguna Beach.

His eldest son, Coty, is 14, the age when most teen-agers start thinking about forming rock ‘n’ roll bands.

“At least I think I’ve convinced him it’s not a good idea to be a guitar player,” Roach said, smiling.

He said his 4-year-old son, John, is enamored of Dire Straits’ hit song and video “Money for Nothing,” which seems somehow fitting for the offspring of a man who once told a reporter: “I could make a lot more money if I put on a tie and got a real job, but that would mean I’d have to go to work.”

“It’s funny hearing a 4-year-old sing that song,” Roach said, offering his own impromptu performance of the chorus: “ ‘That ain’t working, that’s the way you do it, get your money for nothing . . . ‘ “

LIVE ACTION: The Blasters-Del Fuegos’ Nov. 23 concert at UC Irvine has been canceled because Blasters’ guitarist Dave Alvin is touring with X. The Del Fuegos, however, will perform at the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach on that date.