Like Family Farming, Folk Music Is Tough Way to Make Living

Folk music is the entertainment industry’s equivalent of the small family farm.

It isn’t ripe with profit, especially in its more traditional strains. It doesn’t produce many big-name stars who can feed the appetite of a mass public.

But in some places, where tillers motivated by reasons other than money and fame are willing to nurture the music, folk can get by. It can eke out enough of a harvest to nourish a community of musicians and listeners. It can bring in just enough money to keep the fields under steady cultivation.

In Orange County, folk music is a field lying fallow.

“There is nothing in Orange County of any noteworthy (degree) to even mention anymore. It’s kind of nil,” said Roz Larman, who has been keeping a watch over Southern California folkdom for the past 18 years as co-host, with her husband, Howard, of the twice-weekly “Folkscene” radio program on KPFK in Studio City.

“There isn’t even much chance,” added Carolyn Russell, “for the average person to find out what good folk music is.” Russell has tried to offer that chance. Until about a year ago, she hosted the county’s only folk concert series, presenting monthly performances, often by nationally-regarded talents, on the large, enclosed patio of her home in Garden Grove. But after three years, city authorities ruled that Russell was improperly conducting a business in a neighborhood zoned for residential use, and the music stopped.

Now, there is no regular outlet in the county for the modest but artistically vibrant circuit of folk performers who release albums on independent labels and tour the nation, playing mainly in colleges, coffee houses and church halls.

When these folkies come to Southern California, they have several options in Los Angeles County, including two well-established venues in private homes. San Diego County recently lost its longtime folk outlet, the Old Time Cafe in Leucadia, to motel development. But the former owners of the cozy restaurant-concert club have started a new, nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping a steady flow of acclaimed folk talent coming to the San Diego area.

In Orange County, from all evidence, there is an audience for folk music, but there is no no patron or entrepreneur willing to take on the low-paying, or perhaps even non-paying, role of traditional folk impresario.

Occasionally, a good folk bill will surface, but as a one-nighter, with no guarantee that there’ll be more to come. Queen Ida Guillory, probably the biggest draw in the zesty black-Cajun folk strain known as zydeco, made her Orange County debut earlier this month with a successful show at the Forum Theater in Yorba Linda. The San Francisco-based accordionist’s arrival here was late in coming: She’d been building a national reputation for more than a decade, with a 1982 Grammy award and a spot as musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” among her credits.

A trio of highly-regarded Irish folk musicians--Mick Moloney, Robbie O’Connell and Jimmy Keane--gave a concert at UC Irvine the same week. Aboout 280 tickets were sold, meeting expectations--as have other folk programs on the campus, according to Betty Tesman, who is in charge of bringing touring groups to UCI. But, she said, don’t expect to see a folk series there. For one thing, it will require a regular venue, hard to find amid a current performing space shortage.

The Coach House in San Juan Capistrano manages to fit some folk music into its eclectic concert schedule. But the club’s concert director, Ken Phebus, says overhead expenses make it impossible to book acts that can’t draw at least 300 people.

So if folkies arrive here at all, it is often by chance.

The series of events that landed one respected member of the folk circuit, Charlie King, in a Newport Beach living room for a house concert two weekends ago was certainly serendipitous.

Led by Roger James, a longtime folk fan who knew King’s music, a party of friends active in anti-nuclear and peace groups had traveled to San Diego County to see King play about a year ago at the Old Time Cafe. They exchanged phone numbers with King, and talked about bringing him to Orange County to play a benefit for one of their political groups.

When King, who lives in Connecticut, found himself having a hard time lining up dates in Southern California for his annual west coast tour, he turned to his Orange County acquaintances. One of them, Elizabeth Lambe, offered to host a show at her mother’s house in Newport Beach. They decided to do it just for fun, inviting friends, putting out public notice through the papers and charging $8 at the door--enough to make it a worthwhile payday for King, and, the sponsors hoped, to recoup the $100 or so that they laid out for free refreshments.

King said his 150 live dates a year don’t include many shows in private homes, but he was glad to establish any kind of a foothold in Orange County, where he’d never appeared. With a Swiss tapestry of shepherds and maidens hanging behind him, a crystal chandelier hanging in front of him, and a paid audience of 40 people filling the living room around him--including bleacher seats on the bedroom staircase--King tossed out his ice-breaking opening line.

“We’re now in the major folk venue in Orange County,” he joked. It set the tone for a concert that was politically pointed, but leavened by gentle humor. The combination won over an audience made up mostly of people who’d never heard of King before. The show’s sponsors, James, Lambe and Dorothy Callison, were glad to give King a boost in Orange County, but none of them is interested in promoting a regular folk soiree.

“I’d like to work on something like this again, probably not soon,” James said. “If Charlie comes in next year and he needs a place to play, we could do it again. Maybe graduate to a church or something.”

Lambe said she was too busy with her job and her political causes to consider a sideline as a concert hostess. “You kind of wish people who were just music fans would do this,” she said.

Carolyn Russell tried. She says her monthly concert series used to draw anywhere from 35 to 110 people who would pay $6 or $7--characterized as a donation rather than an admission fee--to see touring musicians from the traditional end of the folk spectrum. Russell said her mailing list of concert attendees had grown to about 900 names before a Garden Grove police officer came knocking late in 1986.

“The neighbors never complained,” Russell said. “When we came under scrutiny, we went to a city council meeting, and every neighbor signed statements that they knew what we were doing and they were not unhappy with it.” Russell told officials that since she made no money from the concerts, they could hardly be characterized as a business, as the city contended. But in the end, rather than fight City Hall, Russell agreed to cease and desist. She tried sponsoring shows at a church hall for a while, but found there that were far more details to arrange than when she simply opened her home.

“It’s a totally different thing. You have to deal with a pickup truck full of sound equipment and possibly another pickup truck full of chairs that you have to rent someplace, and you have to deal with getting keys to get in. It’s a good deal more wearing, and I’m a busy person.”

Russell hasn’t stopped trying to broaden the folk music base in Orange County. She is a member of two locally based groups, the Occasional String Band and the Louisiana Cajun Trio, each of which recently began to play a monthly folk dance at the Anaheim Cultural Arts Center.

Another pocket of folk activity in the county exists because of musicians’ own initiative. About five years ago, the husband and wife team of Greg and Margie Mirken persuaded restaurant owner Alexander McGeary to give traditional folk music a chance at his Old Dana Point Cafe. McGeary let the Mirkens play on Sunday nights, not expecting that their traditional Celtic and American folk would prove much of a draw.

“To my surprise, they were very successful,” McGeary said. “We started drawing people from out of this region. That surprised me, that this entertainment would have that appeal. What’s interesting about (the Mirkens), they spend time while they’re performing to educate their audience. They take time to explain the instruments they’re playing, the history of the music, and how it evolved. They take care of their own, educate their own.”

McGeary says he’s happy to have the folk flock among his clientele. “It brought in a better audience as far as the quality of people. It’s family oriented, as opposed to a body-exchange type of trade, a pickup bar.”

Folk has continued every Sunday night, with the Mirkens’ group, Blackthorn, pulling in an average of about 75 to 100 people, McGeary said. Encouraged by that success, he expanded his folk offerings a year ago, adding a Tuesday night bluegrass session. But McGeary has no plans to turn the cafe into a strictly folk-oriented club, or to make it a venue for touring folk acts. Pop music, which he offers the rest of the week, draws better.

The Mirkens themselves may be Orange County’s best hope for establishing a forum for visiting folk talent. For the past 12 years, they’ve run the Shade Tree, a folk instrument shop in a Mission Viejo shopping center. In March, they plan to move to bigger quarters in Laguna Niguel. The added space will allow them to turn the shop into a small concert room, seating 50 to 60 people. For now, they plan to stage one show a month.

“We hope we can improve the situation some.” Greg Mirken said. But the Mirkens see the concerts as a sideline to their business: Making the Shade Tree a venue for talent won’t in itself bring in profits, they say, but it figures to bring the shop more visibility--and to make the Orange County climate a little less arid for visiting folk musicians.

Out in that arid climate, Margie Mirken believes, is an audience that’s thirsty to hear folk music.

The Shade Tree sells and repairs only acoustic instruments, and its record and compact disc bins stock only folk music. “We’d have been gone long ago if there weren’t folkies here,” she said.

Bill Goldsmith, who offered nightly folk music for nine years at the Old Time Cafe in Leucadia before it closed Jan. 31, estimates that the cafe drew 20 percent of its clientele from Orange County.

The ideal, of course, would be an Orange County venue along the lines of the Old Time Cafe, or McCabe’s in Santa Monica.

“It behooves somebody in Orange County to tackle that,” said the Coach House’s Ken Phebus. “Somebody that has the wherewithal and the brains. I’d sure love to see that, because there’s a whole lot of talent that marches through Orange County and doesn’t get to play here.”

Margie Mirken, who with her husband is one of the few people in the county drawing a living from folk music, says she has heard that refrain often.

“For years, people have been giving us a hard time: ‘Why don’t you do concerts?’ I say, ‘Why don’t you?’ Everyone I ever talk to about it says, ‘I’m not crazy. I’m not stupid. I have other things to do with $25,000 of my own.’ It’s going to take a reliable promoter, and a reliable promoter has to make an investment.”’ Which brings it all back home to the chancy economics of that small family farm.

“It’s always going to be fringy. It’s always going to be a small audience, and maybe that’s one of the things that makes it special.”