POP BEAT : COACH HOUSE HELPS FILL IN MUSICAL GAP WITH LIVE CONCERTS

In the past two weeks, Gary Folgner has developed new appreciation for the cliche: “When it rains, it pours.”

As the owner of the Coach House restaurant in San Juan Capistrano and recent entrant in the rock concert business, Folgner found himself in the midst of a torrential downpour during last weekend’s Blasters’ concert. The storm revealed two leaks in the newly remodeled club’s ceiling, and Folgner wound up on the roof--drenched--trying to squelch the drips.

In a figurative sense, however, the adage has proven true for the timing of the former Top 40 club’s new format, which began featuring concerts Feb. 7, only a week after the Golden Bear in Huntington Beach closed and two weeks after the demise of Spatz in Huntington Harbour.

One more blow to the Orange County club scene came Wednesday when the Anaheim Planning Commission voted to revoke the conditional-use permit for Radio City, which has been closed since it was destroyed in a November arson fire.

So for the moment, the Coach House is the only club in Orange County booking mainstream rock acts. The only other full-time showcase club is Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach, which has an eclectic booking policy that emphasizes local bands and adventurous, non-mainstream performers.

For Folgner, it has meant diving headlong into concerts instead of gradually testing the waters, as he had planned. “We’re probably going to end up with 14 or 15 shows this month instead of four or five,” Folgner said during an interview recently at the 350-seat club. So when a tentative date for the Los Angeles band X fell through, Folgner was more relieved that disappointed, if only for the extra breathing room.

The club’s bookings are being handled by Ken Phebus and Ed Christensen, who have booked numerous shows at Fender’s Ballroom in Long Beach and other Southern California venues. Their tastes run toward more adventurous new bands like the Chili Peppers, but they said that they are being more conservative with initial bookings to get the club established.

Later, they hope to take advantage of the club’s size--about 40% larger than the Golden Bear--to bring acts to Orange County such as the Replacements, which bypassed the county on their last tour because there was no suitably sized club available. Folgner also said that he wants to present some jazz shows and non-musical activities such as boxing, both live and closed-circuit broadcasts of major bouts.

Ticket prices have been ranging from $8 for Saturday’s Tower of Power show to $25 for Jerry Lee Lewis’ March 2 concert. In addition to the main floor seating area, the club has six upstairs private booths that can be rented for $20-$35, varying from show to show.

Although most of the rock acts now booked are playing the club for the first time, the concert business itself isn’t entirely new to Folgner. When he bought the Coach House in 1981, he operated it as a country nightclub and periodically showcased such performers as Janie Fricke, Donna Fargo, the Bellamy Brothers and Johnny Rodriguez.

After the urban cowboy fad died down, he reverted to Top 40 bands. But Folgner believes that the area is now ripe for an original music club.

“South Orange County has had nothing,” Folgner said. “Mission Viejo is blossoming and it’s about ready for something big.”

The idea of switching to concerts full time was cemented by the success of two shows last fall by Dave Mason and Leon Russell. “They both did real well--better than all the others we’d ever had here,” Folgner said. He has also been pleased with the response to the new batch of concerts. “For Tower, we got people from as far away as Ventura, the San Fernando Valley and Burbank.” The one disappointment so far has been Wednesday’s Felony concert, which sold only a handful of tickets in advance.

The Blasters, on the other hand, sold out the first of two shows Friday and came near a sellout at the second. Upcoming shows include Ronnie Montrose (Feb. 28), Dick Dale and the Del-Tones (March 1), the Beat Farmers (March 7), Johnny Thunders (March 22), Leon Russell (March 27-28) and David Lindley and El Rayo-X (March 29).

The club boasts an extremely comfortable room with above-average sound and lighting. The room’s high ceilings prevent the claustrophobic feeling of other clubs and--with the aid of an air-conditioning system that actually works--helps alleviate the hot, stuffy atmosphere that frequently hampers rooms of similar size.

The walls are decorated with late 19th-Century artifacts to give the effect of an Old West town, not unlike the interior of the Crazy Horse Steak House in Santa Ana.

Along with a full cocktail bar, the Coach House has a limited dinner menu offering steak, fish and chicken teriyaki dinners starting at $9.95. But it does not serve the snack foods that would be expected at such a club.

Nestled almost invisibly in an industrial park off Camino Capistrano, the Coach House has an out-of-the-way location that is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Without flashy signs, prohibited by local ordinance, the Coach House is hard to spot for first-timers, Folgner admitted.

But because it is away from residential dwellings, it may avoid the troubles with neighbors that have plagued so many other concert clubs.

“We’ve got the freeway on one side and the river at the bottom of the hill. Our nearest neighbor is a quarter-mile away,” Folgner said. “I don’t think we’ll have that problem.”

COSTA MESA GETS JAZZED: The 18th Orange Coast College Jazz Festival will climax with a March 22 concert featuring the powerful one-two punch of the Count Basie Band, now led by Thad Jones, and Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd, whose veteran leader is marking his 50th anniversary in jazz this year. Other performers will include Bobby McFerrin, Subramanium, Larry Coryell and Bud Shank, who will be in concert on March 21. Soloists with the OCC Big Band will be Pepper Adams, Curtis Fuller, Claude Williamson, Art Davis and Carl Burnett. The festival, which will run March 20-23 in the college’s 1,200-seat Robert B. Moore Theatre and the 300-seat Fine Arts recital Hall, is sponsored by the Coast Jazz Society. For further concert or ticket information, call 432-5880.

LIVE ACTION: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band will play the Crazy Horse on March 17. . . . The Righteous Brothers will perform at the Hop in Fountain Valley on Feb. 26. . . . The Beat Farmers will be at Safari Sam’s in Huntington Beach on March 2.