A Rock Fan Who Made It Pay Off : But Jim Guerinot Still Steers Clear of System

Jim Guerinot considers the most successful moment of his professional life to have been the day back in 1982 when he stopped going to work.

Oh, he still reports to an office regularly, and he draws a respectable salary: These days, he carries the imposing title of executive director of artist development at A&M; Records in Hollywood.

But ever since the wide-eyed, curly-haired rock ‘n’ roll fan from Fullerton left his job stocking groceries on the night crew at Vons, nothing that he has done for a living--from independent concert promoting to band managing to now--has really felt like work .

“I’d be doing this stuff for free,” Guerinot said over lunch recently at a Fullerton restaurant near the family home where he visits his parents every weekend.

The ambitious hotshot who always was in awe of the music industry’s movers and shakers has a hard time accepting the notion that he is rapidly becoming one of them. So far, at least, he hasn’t adopted the jaded tones of the typical privileged-but-bored power broker.

Wearing a get-a-load-of-this expression, Guerinot described an average weekend after he went to work in 1985 for Avalon Attractions, the giant Southland concert promoter that books the Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre:

“I would go down to Newport and body surf or hang out at the beach, then get to Irvine Meadows about 3 o’clock and play basketball (on a backstage court) for a few hours. Then I’d shower up, eat dinner and do the show.”

“That’s Club Med,” he said with a laugh. “That’s what I would pay to do.”

For a recent presentation on the new artists and records he will be helping to promote at A&M;, label president Gil Friesen escorted him through a recording studio where he had an unexpected encounter.

“He said, ‘Take a look at this girl singer.’ I was watching this female singer doing something, and I realized the guy sitting next to (producer Jimmy) Iovine at the mixing board was Bono (Hewson, U2’s lead singer). I’m not a huge U2 fan, by any means, but it was still a kick. It’s not the kind of thing that will make or break my life, but still. . . .”

At 29, he still sounds like the kid who used to clip concert ads from newspapers and tack them up to a bedroom bulletin board along with his ticket stubs.

Millions of people grew up loving rock ‘n’ roll; few have parlayed that love into as dynamic a career, and as quickly, as Guerinot. His first paying job in the musicbiz was as concert chairman at Fullerton College in 1981-82. After a similar position at UC Irvine, he went to Avalon as a booking agent. A booking job with MCA/Universal Concerts was next and led to his current post at A&M.;

Two key factors in his rise well may be his unflagging exuberance and that genuine absence of any show-biz affectation: He arrives for an interview wearing the same unassuming black T-shirt and jeans in which he usually is seen at concerts--or around the office.

But the guileless grin and baby-faced demeanor can be deceiving: Guerinot is also a seasoned and, when necessary, nervy businessman.

“The music business is simple: it’s all about people,” said Steve Rennie, Avalon’s vice president. A former independent concert promoter, Rennie met Guerinot while he was handling concerts at UCI. When Rennie closed his own firm and went to work for Avalon, he brought Guerinot along.

“If you can play people,” Rennie continued, “you can do all right in this business. . . . Just knowing the music isn’t enough, not to succeed at a high level.

“When Jim went over to MCA, it was an absolute steal for them. You just don’t get many guys with that kind of enthusiasm who understand music, who have an innate business sense, and who have the proper touch in any situation. There are times in this business when you have to be an absolute jerk and the next second you have to be a nice guy. Usually, you wind up being one or the other. Very few people can do both and be credible.”

Before he jumped to the record industry side of the fence last year, Guerinot was among a handful of key players who shaped Orange County’s live music scene during the ‘80s.

A tireless devotee and promoter of up-and-coming bands, Guerinot has pursued the shock of the new from Day One, when he signed punk band T.S.O.L. to play Fullerton College. That show was memorable not just as his maiden voyage as a promoter, but for the booking agent’s nightmare it became: When a rowdy, over-capacity crowd showed up, police sealed off the campus and shut down the concert.

Nevertheless, Guerinot soon was hired to book shows at Ichabod’s, a crusty bar that once (before the compelling need for Burger King stand No. 4908 brought the wrecking ball down on the place) hosted such cutting-edge bands as Suburban Lawns, the Dickies, the Alley Cats and, in one of those you-should-have-been-there billings, R.E.M. as the opening act for the Untouchables.

Guerinot presided over larger-scale concerts at UCI’s 2,000-seat Crawford Hall back in the pre-Bren Events Center era. Meanwhile, he frequently staged shows in such oddball sites as a Boys Club in Placentia, where he showcased Fullerton punk heroes Social Distortion, the band he now manages.

That concert drew several hundred animated (though minimally violent) punk fans, and when Guerinot applied for a permit to hold concerts there on a regular basis, city officials responded, not surprisingly, with a firm “No thanks.”

Undaunted, Guerinot went to a former disco in Orange and master-minded a concert series designed to provide the county with some of the sense of occasion and musical ground-breaking found in Los Angeles, at such hot spots as the Palace. Once a week during the summer of 1987, the Confetti nightclub was dubbed “Pretty Vacant,” a nod to the Sex Pistols’ song: Decked out like an underground post-nuclear bunker, it hosted concerts by such talked-about groups as Concrete Blonde, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, The Mission U.K., Jane’s Addiction and Erasure.

But the series petered out when the club changed managers and its enthusiasm for adventuresome music dwindled.

Guerinot laments the lack of an energetic club scene in Orange County these days and maintains that it is not because it is any harder to start the momentum rolling now. “It has to take that one person who wants to do it, who really enjoys it,” he said.

Still, the sorry state of the local scene notwithstanding, weekly pilgrimages to Orange County provide a connection with his roots that Guerinot relishes.

Religiously every Sunday morning, Guerinot treks down from his house in Encino to Fullerton to play basketball with a group of former classmates from Sunny Hills High. After a couple of hours of that, he drives his Porsche (“my one indulgence”) a few blocks to the home his parents bought in 1972 when he was 13 and the family moved from Rochester, N.Y. This is where he spent his teen years, often in stereotypically wild style.

“I had massive truancy problems. . . . By the time you’re a junior in high school, you’ve had U.S. history nine times or something. I liked the subject and I knew it pretty well. So I would never go to class, except for tests. I got in a huge fight with the teacher because I didn’t think it was fair that he gave me a C on my report card when I got an A on all my tests.

“He said: ‘If you’re at a job and you don’t come to work, you don’t get paid.’ And I said: ‘Unless you get your work done.’ That was it-- ‘To the principal! Suspended.’ ”

He still expresses some guilt over all that, even though he went on to receive an AA degree at Fullerton and a BA in English at UC Irvine.

“I was having a lot of fun, but I gave my parents a lot of grief, and it slowed me up,” he said. “That’s why it was so important to me to finish my college degrees.”

But Guerinot still views himself as an outsider looking in, not all that different from the kid who flaunted an anti-establishment sense of enterprise.

“They had these time stamps that would re-admit you to class. I had gone out and gotten one and was selling stamped time cards in the parking lot for 50 cents. . . .

“I don’t ever want to be part of the system because as soon as I am part of it, I’m dispensable. As long as I’m still outside that and don’t fit in, I’ll be an alternative to something.”

He provided all kinds of alternatives while booking the Universal Amphitheatre and other MCA-owned facilities during a 10-month stint last year: The acts he presented included Public Image Ltd., Echo & the Bunnymen, Love & Rockets, Gene Loves Jezebel, R.E.M., Los Lobos and others that also helped infuse new life into facilities best known, as Guerinot puts it, “as places Frank Sinatra likes to play.”

Perhaps his most inspired booking at the Universal Amphitheatre paired rock pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis with seminal L.A. punk band X--which had released a hit version of Lewis’ “Breathless” at the time.

“That was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen Jerry Lee do--he discovered a new audience that night,” said Larry Vallon, executive vice president for MCA Concerts and the man who hired Guerinot away from Avalon.

“On a flight over to London,” Vallon recalled, “Jim and I were sitting on the plane talking about the amphitheater--how we were trying to get more of a rock ‘n’ roll vibe going, and ways we could do so. He came up with the thought (of taking) the seats out of the orchestra pit. . . . That really was the beginning of turning the amphitheater into more of a rock ‘n’ roll room.”

But partly because the role of a booking agent was beginning to feel a little too familiar and comfortable (“I don’t ever want to be part of the system”), Guerinot soon decided that it was time to tackle a different end of the music business, an area to which he had had little exposure.

He went to A&M;, and sure enough, “every day it’s something new. That keeps it real fresh and exciting. It also means that you make mistakes, and all of a sudden levels of expertise that you’ve held in other positions are no longer there. It’s difficult not to feel like the in-house expert on something, to have to solicit assistance.

“But that’s all part of it. When the days are frustrating, that’s when I have to sit back and say to myself: ‘You’re supposed to be learning. You’ve been in the record business for what--6 months? You aren’t supposed to be the genius yet.’ ”

He figures that the job can’t help but prepare him for his next goal: opening his own management firm. He already has logged some experience in management, advising not only Social Distortion but Dramarama and the Vandals.

Most of his managing efforts of the last 5 years, though, have been focused on Social Distortion, a band that has represented both the best of punk rock--its liberating musical spirit--and the worst, its glorification of personal excess.

Lead singer Mike Ness’ descent into and escape from the hell of heroin addiction also had Guerinot on a roller-coaster ride. At first, Guerinot dismissed all the indulgences as part of the wild-and-crazy life all adolescents flirt with; he recalls that his only concern about Ness’ constant quest for drugs was that “he didn’t steal the beer I was drinking.”

But soon, the magnitude of Ness’ problem became clear. “I was driving him some place and he started shooting up in my car. He was such a chemist--he would show you the whole process: you mix this and this--and there was a dark side of me that was fascinated by the whole thing. And then I thought, ‘What is this? He just shot up.’ ”

Once, Guerinot saw Ness nearly die from an overdose. After that, he helped nurse the singer through recovery. The musical fruit of that period--the group’s 1988 album “Prison Bound”--offered a powerful recounting of those dark days.

And now that Ness has been clean for about 2 years, Guerinot sees a bright future for the band. In his office at A&M;, Guerinot (whom the band calls “the Colonel”) keeps a large Social Distortion poster mounted over his desk.

“Our relationship was a friendship before it was ever a manager-band relationship,” said Social Distortion guitarist Dennis Dannell. “That’s what’s held it together this long. He’s been like a brother; sometimes even like a dad. He’s stuck his neck out a lot for us. Right after Mike got cleaned up, Jim let Mike live at his house for 6 or 7 months. We pretty much figure him like the fifth band member. . . .”

Like most teen-agers, Guerinot took up the guitar once. But he abandoned any fantasies of becoming a rock ‘n’ roll star after he signed up for an expensive music course at the Dick Grove Music School in the San Fernando Valley and an instructor told him, “I really think you may be tone deaf.”

“I skipped out and never came back,” Guerinot recounted. “I didn’t even ask for my money back.” But he refused to relegate music--the thing he loved most in life--to sidelight status, the way many of his co-workers at the grocery store did.

“You see the guys who right off the bat get the condominium and the Trans-Am and work night crew for the rest of their lives. I was thinking, ‘Oh God, I don’t want that to happen to me--no way.’ Like Boogie says in ‘Diner’: ‘If you don’t have good dreams, you have nightmares.’ That to me was a nightmare.”

So he kept hustling leads until that memorable day when he was earning enough money through concert bookings to pay his rent.

His philosophy for success? A rock ‘n’ roll analogy, natch:

“I’ve often compared this business to the big concerts they used to have at Anaheim Stadium, with Rod Stewart or the Who: You’re packed in, and as soon as somebody moves his feet forward a little bit, your feet are back at his heels. You just kept moving them forward constantly.

“That’s the way I see it in this business: You just constantly keep going forward, a little bit at a time.”